Time-Ghost: Art After Andy – The Biography of Andy Warhol by Blake Gopnik

Last Photo of Andy Warhol Alive (1987) by Peter Bellamy: “I was walking down Central Park West when I saw Andy Warhol being visited by the angel of death. She opened the door and got into the limo and they drove off, and the next day I read that he died.”

“Images, our great and primitive passion . . .”   

“The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves the outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. Which side does an object turn toward dreams? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.”

                                                                           – Dream Kitsch, Walter Benjamin ca. 1930.

Some artists loom so large on our cultural landscape that their shadow covers everyone who comes after them, and indeed, some heavyweights even obscure the very aesthetic horizon that they themselves helped to construct. The artists of the 20th century who can be said to be so influential and impactful, so important to the vernacular we use to even discuss art now, that their presence made possible the clearings in which whole clusters of others congregate stylistically can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. Naturally enough, which fingers depends on which hand, but after much consideration it seems plausible that a scant few were so gargantuan in their production of new visual values that one can literally trace the branches of the artistic family trees they planted.

On my own hand there are five such titans: Cézanne, Picasso, Duchamp, Giacometti and Warhol. I realize they all happen to be white male artists, but I can’t help that, even though I can with absolute confidence also proffer Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago as exemplary exponents of a feminist ethos of nearly equivalent prowess. But they, like many other practitioners in either gender, tend to work in fields originally germinated by those first five I mentioned. So I apologize in advance to all my many feminist friends and accept full responsibility for the personal biases of my own critical judgments. We do what we can within the limited scope of our own frail faculties and hope to be forgiven for unintended oversights.

Tease: Andy Warhol in Iran

Nima Rakhshanifar and Henry Stram in Andy Warhol in Iran. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The first play to be mounted on Barrington Stage Company’s St. Germain stage in three years is a two-hander, Andy Warhol in Iran, inspired by the artist’s 1976 trip to Tehran to snap Polaroids of the Empress Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s wife, in preparation for painting her portrait. (Barrington Stage commissioned the piece, which is one of several new plays promised in this post-COVID season.) The two characters are Warhol – played by Henry Stram, who appeared in Richard Jones’s productions of The Hairy Ape and Judgment Day at the Park Avenue Armory – and a revolutionary named Farhad (Nima Rakhshanifar). Farhad is part of a group that hatches the idea of kidnaping Warhol from his hotel room and holding him hostage as a way of telegraphing their cause. Their scheme isn’t worked out very well, and neither, I have to say, is the plot of Brent Askari’s play, where the kidnaping is implausibly amateurish (Farhad wields a toy gun painted to make it look less obvious) and Warhol continues to cower in fear even after he figures out that he’s in absolutely no danger.

From the Print Room Archives: Andy Warhol in the Flesh

When I started as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I knew I needed a part-time job. I was prepared to wash dishes. But through a combination of pure accident and prescient timing I was hired at Oberlin’s prestigious Allen Memorial Art Museum as a Print Room assistant, a position that before my job interview, knowing little about the inner sanctums of art museums, I had mixed up in my head with Copy Room assistant. I had the vague notion that I would be Xeroxing flyers for minimum wage when, reporting to the museum for my interview, I was greeted in the lobby by a young curator with a freshly-issued PhD. She took me up to a tiny office in a large, airy room that was not in fact for photocopying but for storing and displaying the museum’s exquisite collection of prints, drawings and photographs the Print Room assistant-to-be would help manage and oversee.

Gobsmacked, armed with a couple of art history survey classes and the attitude that this was ridiculously, almost surreally, better than washing dishes – better, even, than Xeroxing – I stated my case and the curator, almost as new to Oberlin as I was and without knowing any better, gave me the position without waiting to interview the mob of upperclassman art history majors who were more richly deserving, and infinitely more qualified, than I. But I was dutiful and a quick study, and perhaps more importantly, utterly in awe. Three times a week I signed in for my ring of keys that unlocked the old wooden cupboards beneath the print gallery display cases where resided the long, shallow black solander boxes filled with matted prints. I would unlatch a box and delicately pick up each print in turn, peel off the strip of glassine beneath the mat to uncover the naked image it sheathed. My job was to pull prints from storage for research visits or classes; in this way, I held etchings by Rembrandt and by Whistler, the ragged modern woodcuts of Kirchner and Nolde which seemed to me, on each viewing, both furious and sad, and a pastel of a nude woman by Matisse that electrified me with its sudden intimacy, as though, unseen by either artist or model, I had drawn back a curtain on the spongy brightness of her defiant sensuality.

Summer in the City: A Musical Notebook

In the 1997 film My Son, the Fanatic, based on a Hanif Kureishi short story, Parvez (Om Puri) is a Pakistani-born taxi driver and secular Muslim. His family life takes an unexpected downturn, however, when his son Farid (Akbar Kurtha) converts to fundamentalist Islam. Parts of the picture play like the reverse of the familiar story of the teenager faced with intolerant parents and so turns to music for comfort. In My Son, The Fanatic, it's Parvez who heads to the basement because of his intolerant son to find refuge playing his favourite R&B records. One of those tracks happens to be Percy Mayfield's sumptuous 1950 song, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" ("Heaven please send to all mankind/Understanding and peace of mind/And if it's not asking too much/Please send me someone to love"), which stayed perched on the black music charts for 27 weeks. Director Udayan Prasad takes this soft and pleading ballad, written four years before the United States Supreme Court would outlaw racial segregation in schools, and turns it into a secular prayer.

Andy Warhol would have been 85 this year. Lou Reed and John Cale's remarkable Songs for Drella, a song cycle portrait of their former mentor, is the perfect tonic and tribute to the late painter and film-maker. Reed and Cale, a fractious pair even on a good day, hadn't spoken to one another for years until Warhol's memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on April 1, 1987. It was painter Julian Schnabel who suggested they create a memorial piece for Warhol. So they set about writing songs that told Warhol's story, and in early January 1989, Cale and Reed, despite their troubled friendship, recorded the album. (Cinematographer Ed Lachman would also film a stunning live performance, but without an audience, on December 4–5, 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) Songs for Drella (a nickname contraction of Dracula and Cinderella) has a touching delicacy ("Style it Takes"), features honest self-examination ("It Wasn't Me"), a periodic defiance ("Work"), and sometimes, even a jolting and blistering unapologetic anger ("I Believe"). It's as if Reed and Cale could only bring Warhol to life when they finally faced each other and settled their scores. From the grave, Andy Warhol found a memorable way on Songs for Drella to make them brothers again.

Art of the Ordinary: A Revolution in Meaning

Andy Warhol and Brillo Boxes, the Stable Gallery, New York City, 1964. (Photo: Fred McDarrah)

“Images, our great and primitive passion . . . ” – Walter Benjamin, ca. 1930

Richard Deming's new book Art of the Ordinary (Cornell University Press) explores a major revolution in the meaning of what art is and what it’s supposed to do. Its subtitle sums it up rather nicely: the everyday domain of art, film, philosophy and poetry. Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary, he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it.

Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising places – as in a stand-up comic’s routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one’s ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim, poet John Ashbery, artist Andy Warhol and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society.

Post-What: Just What Was Modernism, Anyway?

“By 'modernity,' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the so-called eternal and the supposedly immutable . . . “ – Charles Baudelaire, poet of the inexpressible.

It is very important, perhaps even crucial for some of us, that we come to have a full and clear grasp of what modernism actually was before even dreaming of approaching the thorny question of what so-called postmodernism might mean. Let’s not be too hasty here. Like most advanced forms of alternative thinking, at least on the surface, modernity emerged as a discussable notion during the mid-19th century in Europe, specifically France, which had already long established itself as a vanguard socially, politically and culturally, especially with the invention of the camera in about 1840. But also like most advanced ideas, the concept of the modern was imported by America and drastically enhanced before being blown up to global proportions.

In the context of art history, modernité, and the designation of modern art covering the early period from roughly 1860-1870, first entered the lexicon in the head, hands and pen of French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose 1864 essay entitled “The Painter of Modern Life” tossed his invented neologism like a conceptual hand grenade into the cultural marketplace. The radical symbolist poet, and possibly the first modern art critic, referred to “the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility which art has to capture and explore that experience.” 

Neglected Gem: Ransom (1996)

Mel Gibson (with Brawley Nolte) in Ron Howard's 1996 version of Ransom. (Photo: IMDB)

Ransom was one of the few exciting American movies released in 1996 – not just gripping but conceptually exciting. And it was the first genuinely adult movie made by Ron Howard. The script, by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon, adapts a long-forgotten picture from 1956 starring Glenn Ford and Donna Reed as a wealthy young couple whose little boy is kidnapped. (This version, which has an exclamation point at the end of the one-word title, shows up occasionally on TCM.) In the original, Ford is about to fork over the half a million dollars demanded by the kidnapper when a newsman covering the story (Leslie Nielsen) persuades him that he’s just as likely to get his son back without it, and – though the script never clarifies this thinking – that in fact the boy is in less danger if Ford doesn’t deliver the ransom. So Ford gets on TV – on the weekly show his vacuum-cleaner company sponsors – and announces that the half million is going on the head of the kidnapper if he harms the boy in any way. Eventually everyone turns against Ford for making this stand, except for the reporter and a loyal servant (Juano Hernandez) and the chief of police; even Reed, who’s doped up on sedatives, deserts him. But in the movie’s point of view, Ford has a superior take on the situation, and he turns out to be right when, in the final scene, the boy wanders in, completely unharmed. This Ransom! (which was released to theatres but feels like it was made for a TV anthology series like Playhouse 90) is a pure-fifties social problem picture, and its theme is straight out of the Arthur Miller translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: the strong must learn to be lonely.

Cyberkitsch: How The Machine Colonized Us When We Weren’t Looking

Walter Benjamin at work in the National Library in Paris, 1937. (Photo: Gisèle Freund)

The present digital age is the ideal time to re-examine the ideas of the great German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, author of one of the most important essays in the history of art criticism and visual culture appreciation. His 1936 reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (sometimes translated as "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility") is still salient.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish culture critic who made a precarious and eventually doomed living as a unique kind of journalist, one who tried to make clear the impact of our modern mechanized history on our daily lives. His precious but exotic form of journalism captured both the past history of how we got to live so comfortably among our machines as well as the future history of what those machines might be capable of doing, not just for us, but to us. How we became their people and how they forever altered our hearts and minds – in ways not simply good or bad, but more often mysterious, the outcome of which has still yet to be fully determined.

Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953 by Richard Shmelter

Publicity still from Niagara (Photo by Gene Korman).

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara Falls, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control.” – Boisterous but accurate publicity poster for the film’s release.

“I only stop when I’m done.” – Equally accurate self-analysis from Marilyn herself. 

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Niagara, though some friends prefer to refer to my ardor for it in other ways: obsession, fixation compulsion, fetish. They’re quite right, of course. Maybe it evokes the frequent family road trips I took as a youngster from Toronto to Niagara Falls, or perhaps it was the obvious increase in temperature provoked in a ten-year-old boy caught in the torrential environment of Marilyn Monroe. Guilty as charged. I also enjoy reminding such friends that all those states of mind they teasingly attribute to my passion for this film are essentially the core features of the film noir genre itself.

I can’t count the number of times an argument, or let’s call it a heated disagreement, ensued between myself and other viewers or reviewers who took the noir genre more literally in its black and white, dark urban streets, femme fatale and psycho-thriller overtones. Some friends were underwhelmed by the splashy aura of the falls motif in Niagara, the nearly rural touristy setting, and of course the palette, even if they were mutually taken with Marilyn’s Rose and her sinister appeal. I’m a huge fan of all of those nourish aspects too, but I’m also a huge defender of Niagara as a late-blooming and innovative exponent of the genre that becomes all the more obvious if you simply watch it in black and white as a viewing experiment.

So I’m delighted to report that Richard Shmelter, author of the thoroughly readable and charmingly obsessive Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953, published by Malibu Sunset Media, not only shares my sense of its brilliantly noirish sunlit darkness, but also acclaims it as the film that first put Monroe on the stellar star map and also made her what she clearly was, has been and I suppose always will be: what he calls an iconic influencer. The fact is that, in the absence of a historical context back then in the 50’s for the very postmodern social media concept of what an influencer is and does, Shmelter demonstrates that the impact of her persona and gravitas makes it not only acceptable to call her that, but almost imperative. I guess that kind of makes her a posthumous influencer.

The Unrepentant Leni Riefenstahl

“The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.”

– George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”

In 1974 Susan Sontag wrote a two-part widely read and controversial essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” that was prompted by the publication of Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic book about the Nubian people in the Sudan. Although acknowledging that the images were “ravishing,” Sontag was disturbed about the “disquieting lies” Riefenstahl was peddling about her life – some were included in the book’s dust jacket – at a time when her cinematic output was being de-contextualized at film festivals and museum retrospectives. The former Nazi propagandist was celebrated by some feminists – especially problematic since Riefenstahl had never been concerned about the condition of women, only her own career – and celebrities from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol who admired her creativity. Sontag set out to rebuke Riefenstahl’s rewriting of her personal history, and to define and condemn what she called “fascist aesthetics” arguing that her early mountain films, her documentaries made during the Third Reich, which Sontag acknowledged as “superb films,” and the Nuba photographs constituted a “triptych of fascist visuals.” My purpose is to critique what Sontag got right and to demonstrate that Ray Müller’s highly praised 1993 documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, rather than clarifying Riefenstahl’s misrepresentations, ends up largely affirming them.

Memo from the Future: The Trans-Temporal Work of Kirk Tougas

A frame from Kirk Tougas' The Framing of Perception (1973). The monolith-like altar of ultra-consumption ironically reveals that we ourselves are the ones actually being consumed by a seemingly benevolent Moloch.  Image: Tougas.

This article first appeared in the Spanish film magazine Found Footage, March 2020.

“The assertion for an art released from images, not simply from old representation but from the new tension between naked presence and the writing of history on things; released at the same time from the tension between the operations of art and social forms of resemblance and recognition. An art entirely separate from the social commerce of imagery.”  – Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (2003).

“When is appropriation appropriate?” – Kirk Tougas, 2019.

Every film is a tattoo etched on the surface of time, some more so than others. Certain filmmakers, however, eschew entirely the tradition of distracting the audience from awareness of the fact that they are watching and are customarily invited to submit to a wilful disappearance into a real or life-like story. These consummate others instead tend to invite the audience to relish and savour the viewing experience as a sequence of electric paintings, which may or may not contain a program beyond the temporary tattoo incised onto the dream space they occupy while in a theatre. Some of them, such as Kirk Tougas, go even further: they implore the viewer to actively engage in watching their own watching.

Beyond the Pose: Alex Katz Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

"Self-Portrait," Alex Katz, 1978. Aquatint.

Alex Katz is probably best known as the master of the cool pose.  His close-cropped portraits of family and friends, with their bright, flat hues and glints of sunlight, tap into the glamorous simplicity of billboard advertisements and the allure of movie stills, both of which were aggressively visible when Katz burst onto the New York art scene in the early 1960s.  Alex Katz Prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, jointly organized with Vienna’s Albertina and on view through July 29, opens with a witty self-portrait in which the artist appears in a snappy white jacket like a Hollywood movie star sporting one of those vague, effortless million dollar smiles.  The thing is, when you get close to the prints, you don’t see the master of cool at all: you see a man with an unquenchable thirst for the substance of beauty, vitality and allure that realistic images can both fleetingly disclose and at the same time never quite contain.  The delicious contradiction of his work – intimacy and impersonality, quietism and desire – is all there in the sensuality of his technique, and the MFA’s enjoyably overstuffed retrospective allows you to get a glimpse of the dynamic fusion within the cool, deliberate Pop Art style.  (No reproduction will show it to you in quite this way.)  The disappointment is that beyond putting the art on the walls the curators don’t give you much to go on in looking beyond the surface.

How to Throw Your Voice Visually: Becoming Photography

Chuck Samuels: Becoming Photography (Kerber Verlag, 2021).

 

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” – Michel Foucault

Much of what we now define as the poetics of images, the aesthetics of the camera, and the politics of photography comes to us from the thoughtful pens of cultural theorists such as the German critic Walter Benjamin, the French philosopher Roland Barthes, the American polemicist Susan Sontag, and the British art historian John Berger. Their speculations on what makes photography not only an art form but a special and privileged form of modernist consciousness have paved the way for a deep appreciation of both the magic potential and the seductive powers of technological reproduction. Our ways of seeing and thinking about seeing have often been guided by their ruminations on what happens when we photograph something or someone, and their penetrating analysis of the photographic arts has inspired and influenced generations of image-makers. 

Unexpected Journeys: Bluets and The Secret Garden

Emma D'Arcy in Bluets. (Photo: Camilla Greenwell)

The stage adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s 2009 book Bluets by Margaret Perry, directed by Katie Mitchell at the Royal Court, begins as its source material does: “Suppose I were to begin saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . in this case the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” Nelson’s short book is uncategorizable, a series of short paragraphs that function most powerfully as commentary on two melancholy, indelible events, the end of a love affair and the paralysis of a woman, a close friend of the heartbroken lover, after an unexplained accident. But these events, which are poetically linked – the paralysis of the injured friend is a sort of actualization of the writer’s mental paralysis in the wake of her romantic loss – take up less than a third of the text, which imagines the color blue less as a metaphor for the writer’s feelings than as a gathering place for them, an environment in which we grow to comprehend them. Nelson banks a wide range of references that include Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero’s suicide in the blue coat in which he first danced with the woman he loved spawned hundreds of young men to mimic him; Joni Mitchell’s album Blue and her painting Les Bluets; Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat” and Billie Holiday’s recording “Lady Sings the Blues”; Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie; the lapis lazuli in the mines of Sar-e-Sang in Afghanistan; and the male satin bowerbird, which strews his bower with vestiges of blue substances – including the feathers of other birds he has savaged – in order to attract the female of the species. It’s one of the most strangely compelling books I’ve ever come across.

Out of Vogue: Joan Juliet Buck and The Price of Illusion

Joan Juliet Buck and her father, Jules Buck, in London, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Joan Juliet Buck)

The shiny surfaces in The Price of Illusion reflect a high-gloss world of celebrity and glamour which the author, former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor and writer Joan Juliet Buck, has polished to brittle brilliance. As the title of her recently published memoir suggests, the book is less a hedonistic romp through a high life made fabulous by the ubiquitous presence of Hollywood royalty and designer labels, and more an archly ironic reflection on the pitfalls of vanity and a preoccupation with appearances. Witty and stylishly written, it is an absorbing and entertaining read, a richly sashed window looking onto a whirlwind time. It has just the right amount of A-list love affairs (Donald Sutherland and Brian De Palma figure large) mixed in with insider fashion gossip concerning the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and André Leon Tally, to make it juicy, even as the narrative skirts the edges of personal tragedy.

"It is a morality tale," says Buck, 69, during a recent telephone call from her home in the Hudson Valley countryside outside New York. The bucolic setting is deliberate. Buck recently chose it over Manhattan to be as far away from her former life in the fast lane as she could comfortably get. A pop-culture chronicler whose four-and-a-half-decades-long career started at age 23 when she became the London correspondent for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and then features editor for British Vogue and a foreign correspondent for Women's Wear Daily the same year, she speaks through drags of an ever-present cigarette, a habit picked up around the time a young Tom Wolfe made her the subject of "The Life and Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl," his essay about the 1960s counterculture. Her voice sounds dry, and slightly gravelly. But her intelligent commentary is as sharp as her prose. "I was always looking for the truth,"she exhales. "But growing up I didn't have many guidelines."

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World: From Society to Screen

Politically oppressive regimes threatened by the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll are a key factor in two 2009 films set three decades and 1,500 miles apart. Christian Carion’s Farewell (originally L’Affaire Farewell) is a feature that chronicles a true 1981 cloak-and-dagger tale in Moscow, where a Russian KGB analyst’s teenage son cares more about David Bowie than Karl Marx. Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, a docudrama by Bahman Ghobadi, focuses on the many illicit indie bands dodging authoritarian rule in contemporary Tehran. Both productions make for potent cinema that transcends cultures and continents, much like music.

 The Velvet Underground helped inspire Czechoslovakia’s bloodless 1989 Velvet Revolution, apparently a designation that began to take hold among dissidents when a copy of the Andy Warhol-influenced band’s first album was smuggled into Prague 20 years earlier. In Farewell, French engineer Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) smuggles in a cassette of Queen’s News of the World, along with a Sony Walkman, at the request of a KGB mole, Sergei Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica). In a field far from prying government eyes and ears, his alienated adolescent, Igor (Yvgenie Kharlanov), mimics Freddie Mercury’s moves to “We Will Rock You.” 

Marilyn Monroe: More Than Just a Pretty Face

Marilyn Monroe

As a child, I always looked forward to a Saturday night movie. Especially when we watched a Marilyn Monroe flick. In my pyjamas, I would curl up next to my father as we both became mesmerized (obviously for different reasons) by this actress’ every move. From the devious wife in Niagara (1953), to her signature comedic roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), she stole every show. I, like generations of viewers before, became completely enamoured with Marilyn.

The actress, who would have been 85-years-old back on June 1st, is still a cultural icon all these years after her untimely passing on August 5th, 1962. From her Andy Warhol portrait to the unforgettable scene in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch (where she stood over a subway grate and her white dress blew all around her), Marilyn Monroe is recognized today even by those who were not even born during the star’s lifetime. Her image remains an emblem for beauty, femininity and sexuality.

Still Sticky After All These Years: The Special Edition Reissue of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers

For a broadly acknowledged classic of its form and format, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971) gets surprisingly little respect. It’s always on the list of greatest rock albums, but always far below Exile on Main Street, its 1972 follow-up. Where the Sticky reissue has gotten minimal media push, the 2010 Exile reissue was a major story, leading the New York Times Arts and Leisure section and spot-lit for a week on “The Jimmy Fallon Show.” According to the Rolling Stones—the band’s authorized oral history-pictobiography—mentions Sticky pretty much in passing, while giving several pages to the gestation, creation, and fermentation of Exile. In his 2010 autobiography, Life, Keith Richards gives Exile a dozen or so dedicated pages; Sticky gets about one and a half.

Nor does there seem any particular reason for the reissue to have occurred right now. Sticky is 44 years old this year—not 45, per a notable anniversary or class reunion. Though it comes garnished with a not-bad bonus disc of alternate takes and contemporaneous live recordings, the Sticky remaster is the same one first released in 2009. But no reason doesn’t mean no rationale. The Stones’ current North American tour, begun May 24 in San Diego, is labeled the Zip Code Tour; the Andy Warhol-designed cover of Sticky Fingers famously features a zipper—called a “zip” in the UK. That’s what the commercial confluence amounts to: zip. In lieu of the new product that has historically eventuated a Stones tour, the band are shoving out, at staggered (and at the top end staggering) price points, multiple repackagings of the album that I, along with a few others, consider their finest. The lasting album serves the perishable tour, rather than the reverse. No respect.

You Can Hear His Music: Testimony by Robbie Robertson

Robbie Robertson (right) performing on stage with Bob Dylan in 1965.

Last fall, four autobiographies were released by some of the biggest names in music history: Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run), Phil Collins (Not Dead Yet, Live), Brian Wilson (I Am Brian Wilson, A Memoir) and Robbie Robertson, who named his autobiography Testimony (Knopf), after one of his compositions. Of those four, I was most keenly interested in hearing from Robertson, particularly since I couldn’t book him for a CBC Radio Documentary I co-produced with Kevin Courrier in 2008. I assumed he would have offered some first-rate memories that, happily, are now in print. And since I am a fellow Torontonian, many of the places he writes about are familiar to me.

Robertson has penned an idealistic autobiography that is not for fans of revisionist history: “These are my stories; this is my voice, my song.” Testimony is one hell of a tale and a hefty one, at 500 pages. As a young man growing up in Toronto, he was captured by the sounds of rock 'n' roll, country and blues music that never left him. His aboriginal mother, from the Mohawk Nation in Ontario, had a very rich musical family whose strong sense of traditional storytelling was equally matched by their skills as musicians. He reports on his many visits to the Six Nations Reserve in Southwest Ontario, with great affection – “On the banks of the Grand River I found a quiet spot and sat for a while, musical memories swirling around in my head. This is where it had all begun for me,” Robertson recalls from 1966.

Pop Up: In Conversation with Peter Tunney

DON'T PANIC by Peter Tunney, at NKPR's IT House x Producers Ball lounge at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

During the recent iteration of the Toronto International Film Festival, celebrated mixed-media artist Peter Tunney was out on the street, flinging pasta at a canvas and making sure it would stick. His inspiration was a box of Barilla orecchiette pasta that he had found on the shelf of the Casa Barilla kitchen on the lower level of IT House x Producers Ball, a five-day experiential destination for media and talent during TIFF. Tunney, who left a lucrative career on Wall Street to create inspirational collages sold through his New York and Miami galleries, had taken up a residency at the pop-up and was busy creating one-off works of art celebrating life as an act of spontaneity. “Life is the stuff of art,” Tunney declared as he worked outdoors on Peter Street, turning heads. “It’s got an enormous amount of energy pulsing through it every day, and I am honoring the moment. I am showing gratitude.” When Tunney says thanks he says it loud. His GRATTITUDE billboards, looming large over New York City where he lives, have an extra T on purpose. “It’s a turbo-charged gratitude,” as he is fond of saying. A double jolt of optimism. As an approach to both life and art making you can’t really fault it. A negative world needs positivity and Tunney, 55, is more than happy to provide it as he explained in the conversation which follows: