Watching Wenders’ Perfect Days, with its nods to the VU, Lou Reed et al, one can’t help thinking about how influential that music and that time has become. There is something about the dirty nihilism of New York in the Warhol era, an era of washed out art-as-capital, that has coloured the way we in the West perceive the world. The maw of the great superpower, where a perverse, sado-masochisitic consciousness flowered in filthy needle-strewn rooms, driving the engine that makes the rich richer, turning a soup can into a million bucks, laughing in the face of honest toil. In a way this is also the world of Trump, the fast buck, the cheap con. Or rather, this was the environment in which the Trumps of this world could flourish. A few of these rich Nuyoricans drift around the edge of Woronov’s captivating description of her time as part of the Warhol inner circle. They hang out with Andy, knowing that the more the works of art they buy from him are inflated, the richer they, the owners, will become. She has little time for them. From a suburban background, Woronov is fascinated by the decadence and strangeness of the characters she comes across, hating them as much as she loves them. She shows the world as dirty and degrading, with little of the glamour that has subsequently been bestowed on it. The lives of impoverished artists and drug addicts are always more glamorous in the movie than IRL. Woronov describes how she herself fell into a drug addled purgatory which neutered her moral compass (in one notable chapter she tries and fails to kill her groupie) and lead her to tread the fine line between survival and its opposite. She later moved from NY to LA, where at least she wasn’t constantly on the verge of killing herself. Through all this, Warhol glides like a grey ghost, the shrewdest of operators in a world whose true value he alone grasped.
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