Thanks to SamuraiPandaPoetry for creating the MicroFiction Roundup- it’s his baby.  Thanks also to everyone who contributed, every single one had something to recommend it, all were worthy indeed. Which made the task of choosing harder than I thought it would be- but it’s been a pleasurable challenge. I’ve read all the entries at least three times, and the finalists’ well over a dozen.  Agonized a bit.  But here goes:

In 1976, Warhol was beset by personal and professional turmoil, feeling snubbed by the “real” art world and unlucky in love.  Studio 54 was a year away, but his coke-fueled acolytes and investors were busy assembling a cheap exploitation flick on which to slap his name: Andy Warhol’s Bad. It’s intriguing to think of Lucy’s TV best friend starring in a movie where a crying baby is thrown out a high-floor Manhattan window, and it almost came to be.  But Vivian Vance schooled them: Sick thrills don’t pay my bills.

Andrea “Wings” Feldman (aka Andrea Whips, Andrea April, Andrea Warhol) was a troubled young woman from a wealthy family,  whose exuberant exhibitionism  at first won her the attention and applause she craved.  But her hunger for greater fame,  volatile lashings-out, and personal demons exiled her from the golden circle. She decided she would show them all, and went out with the vengeance of a Fury.

The specter of death was a recurrent theme in Warhol’s art, either as subtext (Marilyn, Liz) or explicitly (Death & Disaster series).

In which Your Faithful Baroness shares unusual anecdotes from the vast library of Warhol literature, with its sprawling cast of characters.

The dark, strange, funny, pervy or glam: Your Day In Warhol Marginalia.

1968: LOU REED AND BILLY NAME HAVE SEX.

Billy Name: “My favorite remembrance of Lou was at the second Factory. Lou came and everything and was getting ready to go and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t come.’ So I made him sit on my face and he said grudgingly ‘Okay,’ so I could get off. So it was a playful relationship. But he could turn it off. I would never turn it off… He was a brat. Other than that, the relationship was purely bonding, real friends, love and respectful, really into art and esoteric literature and very young type things.”

Lou Reed: The Biography by Victor Bockris (1995), p.170

Via Warholstars.org

(Funnily, I’ve heard Laurie Anderson has the same complaint. Selfish!)