Koolhaas, Warhol and 2/2 Stories for Warhol

I am reading Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York and I hit a patch on the skyscraper that made me immediately think of Andy Warhol. Now I am not going to Google "Koolhaas and Warhol" because I want to think that I was the first person to come up with this shit, but the link between the writings of Koolhaas and the films of Warhol seems to me to be such a no-brainer that I doubt it.

As Koolhaas quotes on the Empire State Building, "Empire State seemed almost to float, like an enchanted fairy tower, over New York. An edifice so lofty, so serene, so marvelously simple, so luminously beautiful, had never before been imagined. One could look back on a dream well planned."

The Empire State Building as Dream Tower, which got me thinking of Warhol's 1964 film Empire. An eight hour five minute epic shot of the Empire State in slow motion. Empire is John Giorno's wet dream in Sleep, the 1963 Warhol film. The ever erect phallus of the skyscraper. I place the photo of Edie above as an ironic comment, because as Koolhaus makes clear in his section on the Basin Girl, the skyscraper must suppress biological function, the female. The Empire State will never ejaculate, will never deflate, and to do so as with proven by the World Trade Center is disaster.

In its infancy, the skyscaper, such as the Flatiron Building, the World Tower Building, or the Equitable Building, is merely a model of sheer multiplication. The repetition of the block or site upward. In homage to Warhol, Padgett creates literary skyscrapers, such as Nothing in that Drawer, which repeats vertically "Nothing in that drawer." Similarly, Joe Brainard constructs in a piece "Andy Warhol's Sleep Movie," his own Empire by stacking the phrase "I like Sleep." But the Empire State Building of the Mimeo Revoultion is C Press's 2/2 Stories for Andy Warhol, which consists of ten sheets of the exact same found text stapled together. The capstone is the thermofaxed Warhol cover, which links Empire with Blow Job by featuring a cropped and distorted photo of Ondine receiving oral sex in a bathroom. This photo is likewise stacked, one on top of the other, the two stories for Warhol which tell a tale of the Empire, Sleep, Blow Job, and the Basin queered.

JB