"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

In Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (1995),
supervamp Mary Woronov (Hedy/The Shoplifter, 1965; The Chelsea
Girls, 1966) writes: "People were calling us the undead, vampires,
me and my little brothers of the night, with our lips pressed
against the neck of the city, sucking the energy out of scene after
scene. We left each party behind like a wasted corpse, raped and
carelessly tossed aside. . . . Andy was the worst, taking on five
and six parties a night. He even looked like a vampire: white,
empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the
white worm Ч always hungry, always cold, never still, always
twisting." When told that the artist had actually turned vampire,
Lou Reed arched a ragged eyebrow and quizzed, "Andy was alive?" In
the multitude of memoirs and word or song portraits that try to
define Andy Warhol, there is no instance of anyone ever using the
adjective "warm" about him.
Valerie Solanas, who prompted Andy's actual turning, took
superstitious care to shoot him with homemade silver bullets. She
tried wrapping .32 ammunition in foil, which clogged the chambers,
before resorting to spray-paint in the style of Billy Name (Linich),
the silver-happy decorator of the Factory who coffined himself in a
tiny back room for two years, coming out only at dead of night to
forage. The names are just consonants short of anagrams: Andy
Warhola, Wlad Draculya; Valerie Solanas, Van Helsing. Valerie's
statement, the slogan of a fearless vampire killer: "He had too much
control over my life." On the operating table Ч 4:51 pm, Monday,
June 3, 1968 Ч Andy Warhol's heart stopped. He was declared
clinically dead but came back and lived on, his vision of death and
disaster fulfilled and survived. The stringmeat ghost of the latter
years was sometimes a parody of his living self, a walking Diane
Arbus exhibit, belly scars like zippers, Ray-Ban eyes and dead skin.

Warhola the Vampyre sloped nosferatu-taloned through the seventies,
a fashion-setter as always, as Ч after nearly a century in the open
in Europe Ч vampirism (of a sort) at last established itself in
America. He had no get, but was the fountainhead of a bloodline. You
can still see them, in galleries or People, on the streets after
dark, in the clubs and cellars. Andy's kids: cloned creatures, like
the endless replications of his silkscreen celebrity portraits,
faces repeated until they become meaningless patterns of color dots.
When alive, Andy had said he wanted to become a machine and that
everybody should be alike. How did he feel when his wishes were
coming true? How did he feel about anything? Did he feel? Ever? If
you spend any amount of time trying to understand the man and his
work, you can't help but worry that he's reaching from beyond the
grave and forcing you to become Valerie.
Consider the signs, the symptoms, the symbols: that pale,
almost-albino face, simultaneously babyish and ancient, shrinking
like a bucket of salted slugs when exposed to the sun; the sharp or
battered black clothes, stiff from the grave; the goggle-like dark
glasses, hypnotic black holes where eyes should be; the slavic