Capstone Readings, Pendulum Launch, Guest Author Dave Newman -- All Next Week!

Warhol on Warhol: Some Quotes to Ponder

Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody.
Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.
from "What Is Pop Art?" Art News, November 1963

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From: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (1975) ISBN 978-0156717205

* The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet.
o Ch. 4 : Beauty, p. 71

* I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
o Ch. 6 : Work

* What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it...........
o Ch. 6 : Work, p. 100

* They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
o Ch. 7 : Time, p. 113


(Photo: Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams talking on the S.S. France, 1967, World Journal Tribune Photo by James Kavallines.)

Finals Checklist for Travel Writing

Your final requirement for our class is a portfolio. Your portfolio should include the writing you've done about our travels. As a reminder, you'll have one piece for each of the following experiences:

* The Max Vanka Murals in Millvale
* Pittsburgh's City of Asylum and the Northside/Randyland
* Pittsburgh's Strip District and Wholey's Fish Market
* Back to the Source: Judith Vollmer's Level Green and the Turtle Creek Watershed
* Andy Warhol's Pittsburgh
* The Writers Festival

Please polish each piece, revising with attention to things like audience and possible publication/markets, and compile them in a binder or folder. Please also include your Travel Journal as part of your portfolio (you may type your entries, if that's easier).

In addition to your individual pieces, please write a one-page, single-spaced statement about the effect the trips this term had on your personally and on your writing. (This is assuming they've had some effect. If they didn't affect you, write about that and why.) Consider things like which trip was the most important to you, which offered you the most opportunity for insight/reflection, which resonated with your own experiences and which were completely outside of your experiences, and more.

In order to receive an A, your portfolios must be complete, professional, and show the kind of luminous insights you've seen in the other travel writing we've covered this term.

The deadline for all materials is 5 p.m. on Friday, April 30. There will be a drop box outside of my office.

If you'd like to meet in conference before or during finals week, please let me know. I'm available on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. and then after 5:30 p.m.

Happy revising/revisiting your journeys!

More Warhol, As You Like It

Visit Moon Travel Guides' site for a complete Warhol tour -- including stops at Schenley High School, Carnegie Mellon University and more. http://www.moon.com/destinations/pittsburgh/discover-pittsburgh/explore-pittsburgh/tour-andy-warhol-s-pittsburgh

Googlism for Andy Warhol -- A Poem by Peter Oresick

(From Peter Oresick's book Warhol-o-Rama-- for details and to order, visit www.warholorama.com or www.amazon.com )


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Googlism for Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is a dialect of Ukrainian
Andy Warhol is lost in my lava lamp
Andy Warhol is lurking at his own party like Gatsby
Andy Warhol is loathe to say how much he's raking in
Andy Warhol is appropriating images
Andy Warhol is the first chapter in an old American story
Andy Warhol is to culture what strip mining is to West Virginia
Andy Warhol is famous for creating the character Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol is slowly beginning to recall his past life
Andy Warhol is short on words

Andy Warhol is Pope of Pop
Andy Warhol is expressing his fascination with capitalist commodity fetishism with wit and camp good humor
Andy Warhol is too nice a man to be president
Andy Warhol is a chip off the old Dada
Andy Warhol is the Bill of Rights for inanimate objects
Andy Warhol is a painter whose works do not call for interpretation
Andy Warhol is pronounced clinically dead
Andy Warhol is one of many American celebrities at Tokyo Wax Museum
Andy Warhol is seduced by the idea he could have a soul of his own
Andy Warhol is Art minus the art

Andy Warhol is New York City's smallest borough
Andy Warhol is just one example of how a star is born
Andy Warhol is deviating from slavish copying of inherited Byzantine forms
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60
Andy Warhol is based on a true story set mainly in the '60s
Andy Warhol is a spunky teenager who with pal Philip Pearlstein sets out to find
Andy Warhol is offering rebates when you purchase any 5 cans of Campbell's Soup
Andy Warhol is not responsible for the actions of third parties
Andy Warhol is one of our private jokes—shorthand to goof on obsessive behavior
Andy Warhol is the lunatic with only one idea

Andy Warhol is the Carpathians' highest peak at 2,061 m
Andy Warhol is where the peasants truly believe in vampires
Andy Warhol is Napoleon in rags in Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"
Andy Warhol is a robot yet puts his painterly mark on his mechanical process
Andy Warhol is true to ambiguity
Andy Warhol is almost certainly why I always wanted to be in show business
Andy Warhol is the international gesture for *%&#!
Andy Warhol is suppressing the personal in a marathon essay on boredom
Andy Warhol is a swell costume for theme parties and masquerade
Andy Warhol is asking me to take him home

Andy Warhol is as good as the genre gets
Andy Warhol is prince among the dead celebrity moneymakers
Andy Warhol is available for sale or resale to any and all
Andy Warhol is a blue-collar town of steel mills & rabid football fans
Andy Warhol is just another weird manifestation of the American mania to absorb all into the soft, pulpy wad of pop culture
Andy Warhol is having a near-life experience
Andy Warhol is reality's mirror so try drawing something banal
Andy Warhol is a sphinx without a riddle
Andy Warhol is played in blond by the dead funny Tony Curtis
Andy Warhol is a rich subject to talk about

Andy Warhol is struck by lightning up to 50 times each year
Andy Warhol is my guardian angel severely tweaked
Andy Warhol is the cradle of these folk tales
Andy Warhol is a lovely dog but he is just not himself these days
Andy Warhol is bound to give assent to all that the Church teaches
Andy Warhol is beyond amazing, as is his wife Jan
Andy Warhol is a Slavic racial type from Pittsburgh
Andy Warhol is an exception to that rule
Andy Warhol is full of surprises for the uninitiated
Andy Warhol is making you dreamy

Andy Warhol is not often recognized as a key asset to Washington
Andy Warhol is canoodling with Capote in a corner banquette
Andy Warhol is to Norman Rockwell what Judas is to Jesus
Andy Warhol is boy king of mythic Ruthenia
Andy Warhol is the beneficiary of some seriously low expectations
Andy Warhol is owned and ultimately managed by its shareholders
Andy Warhol is a hammer—everything's a nail to him
Andy Warhol is just one of many stars to leave hand and footprints in cement
Andy Warhol is more is better
Andy Warhol is a hoot as an Asian

Andy Warhol is the idea of the collapse of grand narratives
Andy Warhol is the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela
Andy Warhol is tomato-soup-can-boy in I Shot Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol is uncapping an ad blitz for loyal ketchup customers to pour out
Andy Warhol is vivid in its historical reality but forces yawns
Andy Warhol is an idiot savant well I don't know about the savant part
Andy Warhol is voluptuously amusing as a girl on a husband hunt
Andy Warhol is most often explained by the masochism of diva worship
Andy Warhol is famously famous for being famous

Andy Warhol is the vapor trail of the American experience
Andy Warhol is the hub of East Slovakia & Transcarpathian Ukraine
Andy Warhol is viewed as something of a spent force in certain circles
Andy Warhol is a sucker for Sandra Dee in Tammy Tell Me True
Andy Warhol is one of the more profitable purveyors of distraction owned by media goliath Viacom
Andy Warhol is dramatized in all his brilliance on this quartz movement wall clock
Andy Warhol is within a day's drive of half of the United States
Andy Warhol is why the terrorists hate us
Andy Warhol is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without consent
Andy Warhol is a way of thinking that so far has eluded precise definition

Andy Warhol is no soup can
Andy Warhol is never mentioned in scripture
Andy Warhol is not enjoying a post-game beer and masculine camaraderie
Andy Warhol is ignoring what they write just measuring it in inches
Andy Warhol is a major player in minor things
Andy Warhol is one of many artists we can deliver at a discount
Andy Warhol is more American Dream than historical figure
Andy Warhol is an optimist—he believes that citizens, given equal opportunity, earn the right to fame
Andy Warhol is one of those people in my life I would love to give something back to
Andy Warhol is a hospital where the beds must remain empty

Andy Warhol is the only reason anyone heard of them in the first place
Andy Warhol is not going to be at the party

Warhol and the Vision of Pop Art

Our travels this week will take us to the roots of one of Pittsburgh's most famous sons. We'll trace Andy Warhol's life in three stops. The first will take us to Paul Warhola Scrap Metals on Pittsburgh's North Side, where Andy's nephew Marty Warhola (that's him, left) offers his own art amid the backdrop of a salvage yard. (For background, here's a recent story about Marty and his art: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleynewsdispatch/s_675497.html.) Then it's on to the Warhol Museum, where we'll get up close with Andy's own work and vision. Be sure to bring your Pitt I.D. with you -- admission is free with i.d. After the museum, we'll cross the Andy Warhol Bridge and swing by Andy's childhood home -- 3252 Dawson Street in South Oakland, a rowhouse with a green and white striped awning and a collection of hedges. The Warholas were a family of especially modest means — Andy’s father Andrei toiled as a construction worker during the Depression and was often without gainful employment. We'll talk a bit about how Andy's working-class Pittsburgh background may have played out in his art. And we'll read some poems by Pittsburgh's own Peter Oresick, whose latest book Warhol-o-rama, will bring all this home.

Ideas for writing:

How does your own background play out in your writing, in your life? Where do you connect with Warhol, and where do you feel distance? What class do you consider yourself to be -- working, middle, upper, none of the above? How do class issues affect the way you see the world? How conscious are you of your place in the world? Where does beauty fit into your life?

Travel Class Schedule for the Next Two Weeks

Hi Everyone -- Hope you all had a lovely (and inspiring) break!

Please e-mail me your Susan Orlean-inspired pieces by 5 p.m. on Friday. Due to next week's Writer's Festival, we won't meet in class this Saturday, March 20, but I will send you comments on your pieces via e-mail.

Instead of meeting in class, I ask that you read Stern's New and Selected Poems and attend the festival events next week.

The schedule again is:
* Monday, March 22 -- Faculty/alumni reading/festival kick-off, 7 p.m.
* Tuesday, March 23 -- Fiction writer/poet Kim Chinquee, craft talk at noon and reading at 7 p.m.
* Wednesday, March 24 -- Fiction writer Sherrie Flick, reading at 7 p.m.
* Thursday, March 25 -- Poets Gerry Stern and Anne Marie Macari, reading at 7 p.m.
* Friday, March 26 -- Fiction writer/poet Joseph Bathanti, craft talk at noon and reading at 7 p.m.

All events are free and open to the public. All events are in the Village Hall Coffeehouse. Village credit is available.

In order to receive a passing Participation grade for the week, you must attend at least two events. More is much better. Please be sure that one of those events is Stern's reading on Thursday, since we're reading his book for class. Sign-up sheets will be available at all events.

Your writing assignment for the week will be to write about one of the festival events. Approach it as a travel writing piece. This is an annual event, so keep that in mind as you write.

Let's plan to meet in class on Saturday, March 27. Pending his health, we may have a Pittsburgh tour with Gerry Stern. If that doesn't work, we'll visit the Carnegie Museums as a back-up.