Fifteen minutes of souped up shenanigans
Ignore flying Teslas. Keep your hands on the wheel and drive.
Toil away, little Subaru. Rev your engine pure and clean and make haste, make trouble, mach schau. Peel out in a cloud of “yes can” and “will do”. Cover more ground with less effort, your foot planted firmly on the accelerator of go. Keep raging with the vroom, the putt-putt, the ah-ooh-gah. Just keep on going you little engine that could, you magical thing, you hot rod of close-to-the-edge wreckage.
Pay no attention to the Tesla behind the curtain.
Screech!
Ugh. Sometimes you talk and you make no sense. Who is the Subaru? Am I the Subaru? Are you?
Andy Warhol was a Tesla. Once upon a time. But he worried about becoming a Subaru. Metaphorically. This is not a knock on Subarus1. Great cars. Reliable. Sturdy. And “I worry I’m becoming a Subaru” is not a phrase Warhol ever uttered. Furthermore, Teslas didn’t even exist in the ‘80s, so know that I’m just letting fingers hit keys here.
Stick with me, you! I’m building a structure out of metaphor and magic and theatre of the mind, and it’s gonna take the vision of true dreamers to land this one on the runway of sense.
A Subaru is not a Tesla. It’s not the FUTURE, which is what Warhol saw when he laid eyes upon the work of the young graffiti kids in the ‘80s. The Harings, the Basquiats, the Teslas (metaphor). The worry of becoming a Subaru is a clumsy construct that represents relevance, or more accurately, irrelevance. The fear of it. Warhol was EXCITED about these kids but at the same time he was a little—what’s the word?—bummed. Exhibit A: There’s a point in The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new six-part series on Netflix2, where he describes going to a particular Keith Haring show and feeling jealous.
“This Keith thing,” he says, “Reminded me of the old days. When I was up there.”
When I was up there.
When I was up there and making heads turn.
Before I became a Subaru.
Or course, I’m putting words in the wigged wonder’s mouth here. Andy Warhol was never a Subaru, but isn’t that the fear of anyone driven to make things? The fear that what’s on your page is not as good as what’s on that other person’s page, or perhaps not even as good as what used to be on your page? The fear that you have been surpassed, left behind, ejected from some hot club you finally bribed your way into?
Do you really age out of new? Out of hot? Out of vogue? Isn’t that an arbitrarily assembled vapor cloud of unidentifiable substance? Either way, there will always be new seasons, new models3, new cabs off the rank. Another relentless and hungry Tesla, hurtling through space and time on a collision course with your Subaru of a career.
Subarus. Teslas. As I said, it’s a metaphor. An analogy. A whimsical whimsy of sorts. Clear the clouds—here comes the Philosopher of Ceremonies. Here comes the clarity. Here comes more non-sensical me.
Newsflash: Yes, you will age out of relevance, but only if you care to pay attention to such trivialities. If you’re lucky, during your aging time you will make something that gets traction, or at least read or looked at by someone other than your parents or long-suffering friends. This thing might not make you rich, and it might not give you your 15 minutes, but it will be something you did that came out of you. Good bad ugly, you got it out, it’s done, what a relief!
Phew!
And maybe it will be the new-new for a hot minute. Declared 100% Fresh. And maybe it will be groundbreaking, or maybe it won’t be. It doesn’t really matter because all that matters is that you keep on making. Keep on creating. Can’t stop, won’t stop, as they say. And so with hands upon your wheel, you will drive on and on and on until one day you feel the hot breath of the next on your neck and spy a Tesla in the rearview, and instead of swerving, I say pay it no mind and keep on truckin’.
It’s not all frunks and ludicrous modes. And if anything, you could say the crash of someone like Jean-Michel Basquiat into Andy Warhol’s life was a good thing. It flipped all sorts of creative switches in Andy and reinvigorated his sense of exploration, proving that friendly competition and collaboration can be a driver of any car.
I can hear you spluttering. Chugging along, trying to parse meaning from my rambling screed. Let me prime the pump here.
It doesn’t matter what your vehicle is, just keep the engine running. Something new will always be coming down the road, and if I learned anything from watching The Andy Warhol Diaries it’s to run and gun on the fuel ya brung. Self-doubt, pain, fear, vanity, ego, jealousy, joy. One can only pray that a Basquiat does a hot lap on your racetrack to push you in new and combustible ways. Hope a Tesla does donuts on your work. Wish for a bright and shiny next big thing to drive up so hard on you it forces you to rebuild your engine.
New Years come and go, just as new flavors hit eager tongues and fizz like delicious fire. It doesn’t make the old flavors any less yum. There’s always going to be another Tesla and comparing your shape to the shape of it is a mug’s game. Lamenting your lack of easter eggs is a waste of precious time. Whether you’re a Subaru or a scooter, a Tesla or a trombone, what you drive is just the vehicle and you don’t need a license to crash. What happens, happens, and it happens mostly out of your control. Any schmuck can crash a Tesla into a Subaru. Just remember: it’s not the car, it’s the damn driver, and some of those Tesla drivers might be asleep at the wheel. And I mean that literally.
“A few years into a decade is when it really becomes a decade,” says Warhol. “The '80s. They'll be looking over all the people and picking the ones that will survive. It's when the people will either become part of the future or part of the past.”
Becoming part of the future or part of the past—both are viable options. We should all aspire to become irrelevant. It means things are still moving forward, with or without you, and you never know—you might end up as a dusty barn find that breaks the market one day. Just think about that.
You may never be a Tesla. Heck, you may never even get to be a Subaru. But good riddance to bad rubbish and car analogies are dumb anyway. Just be you and steer. Be the past and the future. If you get 15 minutes, take it, but know that those 15 minutes might be you sitting all alone in your creative car. That’s good. You can change the radio station and control the volume. I’m talking frequencies, man! 15 minutes, 15 seconds, 15 breaths in a really good or dinged-up body—that might be all you get, so make ‘em count.
Ambulate thyself.
The road is open. Run on watts or high octane or farts, doesn’t matter. Just don’t run on empty. The medium is the message is the method and don’t forget to release that handbrake. Your creative car is filled with clowns, you say? I say put them to work before your sun is blacked out by a flying Tesla. Andy Warhol—you’ve heard of him, right? Marylin, soup cans, peeling bananas, zippered fingers, hang him on my war-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hall? Yeah, well Andy Warhol never stopped putting fuel in his vehicle. Never.
And so.
Start your engine and Warhol the absolute soup out of your life.
That’s all I’m saying.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
History books are being rewritten all the time. It doesn’t matter what you do. Everybody just goes on thinking the same thing, and every year it gets more and more alike. Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.
- Andy Warhol, Excerpt from ‘What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part 1)’, Art News, New York, November 1963.
On Rotation: “Andy Warhol” by David Bowie
I only knew the hits of Andy Warhol. He really tried a lot of different stuff I didn’t know about, and was quite sweetly insecure and by all accounts a ‘recreational liar’, but infinitely fascinating. I loved this—the Basquiat episodes were my fav—and want the book now. I wonder what he would’ve done next had he survived that surgery?
Via Infinite 1Up
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
My first car was a Subaru. Don’t bother writing that down—I have never used that as a password reminder.