Everything I've Had But Couldn't Keep
We were in a room full of ghosts, plus Gerard.
We were at the Museum of Sex and we wanted it to be clear that we were NOT having a good time.
The truth is that Graham and Laura and I were only willing to endure the rest of the museum for the sake of the exhibit on its third floor, Looking At Andy Looking, which was a collection of rarely-screened works filmed by Andy Warhol on his 16mm Bolex camera in the early 1960s. We complained our way into the museum via the gift shop1, griped our way up the stairs, and later kvetched our way through the so-called Superfunland (rancid vibes). In the Warhol exhibit, though, we were mostly quiet, preferring to chat in soft tones when not listening to the soundtrack of 1960s pop hits.
As we walked around, there was one gentleman that kept appearing in the films, whether lounging on the back of the titular Couch (1964) or fellating a fellow Warhol Superstar in the Factory’s bathroom2, someone I recognized instantly from my Velvet Underground scholarship: Gerard Malanga.
Contemporaneous accounts of early Velvet Underground performances are few and far between, and even fewer of them actually focus on the band. Almost all of the reviews center around the fact of Warhol and the spectacle of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, their multimedia event: a cornucopia of colored lights, film projections, interpretive dance, and an overwhelming wall of sound that, according to most of the journalists, barely resembled music at all.
Gerard, who danced with the group while cracking a whip, and Nico, who sometimes sang and played a tambourine, are the two performers identified most frequently in these write-ups, which makes sense: they were both blond and astonishingly beautiful, and they generally stood in front of the Velvets so they caught the light more frequently.
Most of these journalists were more concerned with getting a quote from Andy than they were in interviewing the sulky musicians who sang about hard drugs and sadomasochism—and that’s if they could even understand the lyrics through the roar of feedback that poured out of the overworked amplifiers. Everything about the event was so outrageous, such a deliberate and unprecedented assault on one’s sensibilities, that the Velvets were seen by many in the audience as a mere backing band for the larger Warholian display.
One of the most frustrating—and tantalizing—aspects of being a Velvet Underground fan is this lack of primary sources. They were around for about five years. There are only four studio albums3. There is exactly one surviving film of the band’s original lineup in color with synchronous sound. There are only a handful of published interviews, and even the photographs are limited in number. The Velvets bootleg catalog ranges from remarkably high quality recordings that still manage to cut off right as the song actually begins, to tapes that yelp and squeak with microphone feedback and often sound like they were recorded underwater.
All of this to say, it was difficult for me to not feel some resentment toward Gerard for how many words he tended to take up in these descriptions of early VU/EPI performances. Up-tight, the only semi-official history of the band, was authored by Gerard and Victor Bockris, a critic who would go on to write a number of books about other musicians4. Up-tight dedicates an inordinate of time to Gerard’s memories of touring with the EPI, complete with excerpts from his diaries. I felt like he must have been overstating his importance to the act. I found his writing and recollections kind of annoying, drenched in a self-important tone, overly affected.
Regardless of my personal frustrations with him, Gerard was an undeniably load-bearing element of the early Warhol Factory scene in which the Velvet Underground found themselves, and remained so for many years after Lou Reed had unceremoniously fired Andy Warhol as the band’s manager/producer/promoter.
Just as there is a popular tendency to dismiss Warhol’s skills as an artist, there is a similar impulse to paint Andy’s acolytes as all vapid social climbers who had no talents outside of being very nice to look at and/or entertaining to be around. In some cases this might have been true, but in many cases it was not. Gerard especially was trained in silk screen techniques, which is why Warhol hired him in the first place, as well as photography, filmmaking, and writing. And—I suppose—dancing.
It was a combination of his influence on and ubiquity in the space, as well as his handsomeness, that resulted in Gerard being in front of Andy’s camera as often as he was. He was also frequently behind a camera of his own, although those films are less lauded and not often screened.
So when Anthology Film Archives announced a screening of three of Gerard’s films a couple weeks ago, followed by a poetry reading and a Q&A with the man himself, I bought a ticket with the hopes that these films might contain unseen footage of the Velvet Underground and/or the environment in which they often worked. And because he is one of the few remaining people from that scene, I think part of me hoped that I would be able to alchemize something in his presence, memory absorbed via osmosis.
In these films I ended up getting the Velvets footage I was looking for, but I also got a lovely collage of moments out of Gerard’s life from 1965 to 1970, some longer than others, plus a soundtrack by Angus MacLise, the Velvet Underground’s original drummer. The images were by turns frenzied and meditative, marbled by imperfections in the 16mm film. I tried to identify as many people as possible but they often came too fast for me to focus on the faces: Andy and Edie and Piero and Mary and Danny and Paul and Marian and Sterling and La Monte and Candy. Bob Dylan and Jane Fonda and Salvador Dalí.
When we were at the Museum of Sex, I turned to Laura at one point and said something about how bizarre it is that you can go from being one of the most beautiful and well-connected men in New York society and the art world at large, making love to countless equally beautiful and well-connected people, and then end up just an old man posting about how much he loves his cat on social media. I was talking about Gerard, of course, and with more irony than was probably necessary. I pulled up his Instagram on my phone and showed her a recent post that he had made announcing the adoption of his new cat, a tortoiseshell kitten named Rosey.
By all accounts, Gerard has always been a cat person. He’s written dozens of poems about them. In one of the few Velvet Underground documentary appearances he’s made, a cat is sitting on his lap for most of the time he’s on screen. He adopted Rosey a year after losing Odie, an elderly cat he’d taken in from his astrologer friend A. T. Mann.
Gerard loved Odie immensely. In life he wrote long posts that described Odie’s nature using language I admit I found a little flowery and melodramatic but still charming, because I am also a cat person. Following Odie’s death (at the age of nearly 22, older than Gerard was when he first started working at the Factory), the earnestness of this writing increased tenfold. Last year he even published a book of poems dedicated to Odie.
It was strange to watch this man, whom I only knew through photographs of his younger self, mourn his pet over the internet in the present day—a man who has experienced the deaths of so many people in his life, the death of a scene he’d built and a city he’d inhabited. I’m realizing now that I was so struck by his public grief for this animal because in society’s eyes it is ostensibly a “lesser” tragedy than losing a human being. It seems as though it should almost be shameful to mourn an animal so openly, simply as a matter of scale. But none of that matters when you’re in the thick of grief.
Now more than ever I admire Gerard’s outpouring of love for his late companion.
My own cat died very, very suddenly last week. I woke on Thursday morning to find her oddly lethargic; by that evening her condition had deteriorated to such an irreparable degree that I made the decision to euthanize her. The shock of it still makes my stomach churn.
I’ve never been in this apartment without Athena. Hell, I was only in New York for two years before she showed up on the fire escape of the apartment that I shared with my college roommate in Ridgewood. It was a great story, one I loved to tell anyone who would listen: she was a part-time kitty of unknown origins that we assumed belonged to someone else, until one day she unexpectedly gave birth to five kittens in our living room. (She was a perfect mother. It’s not very common that all the kittens in a litter survive.) It was chaos, of course, to have six cats in our tiny apartment during finals week, but it was ultimately one of the best experiences of my life. I had Athena for seven more years after that. I wish it had been 22.
Even though I witnessed her death and saw the doctor take her little body away, there’s part of me that remains convinced that this was all a great misunderstanding—an error that, once rectified through mysterious means, will return my girl to me. Every time I hear a noise, my brain automatically translates it as Athena’s movement elsewhere in the apartment. Without my glasses, every pair of shoes or bag left on the floor adopts her silhouette. I keep forgetting that she’s not just in the other room; I keep remembering that she never will be again.
When I showed Laura the post on Gerard’s account, she took my phone in her hand and studied it for a while. In that moment they were piping “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” by the Monkees into the room at a very reasonable volume, while the colorless light of the film projections flickered in my periphery—a pale imitation of an Exploding Plastic Inevitable show.
“Isn’t that so crazy, that you can be the ‘It’ boy of one of the most important cultural scenes of the 20th century, and still end up as some old guy on Instagram posting cat photos?” I joked.
Laura handed my phone back. She replied, serious, “Yeah, but wouldn’t it have been nice to see them all end up like that?”
On the opposite wall was a series of screen tests of young men that Warhol had found particularly beautiful. They all sat silently in front of the camera, the planes of their faces rendered in stark contrast, shifting in their seats, glancing at something offscreen, smiling shyly, looking bored, sleepy, hopeful, real. Not one of them is still alive today. We were in a room full of ghosts, plus Gerard.
At the AFA screening, seated two rows away from Patti Smith and being very chill about it, I was thinking about what Laura had said in that wretched museum. Gerard read a poem from his new collection about his late friend Rosey Blake, for whom his cat is named. During the talkback he was articulate and warm. He mentioned that a friend of his described him as possessing an “archival consciousness,” which I really liked.
That was the root of his kinship with Andy, I imagine, though based on this screening it seems like Gerard was more inclined toward the organic when it came to which moments he captured on film. Something I noticed in his film from 1968 was the frequency with which he depicted people coming toward the camera, turning a corner or walking down the street, growing larger within the frame, and how their faces would brighten when they saw him. Gerard’s camera is more engaged than Andy’s; the impression it gives is one of involvement rather than voyeurism.
When Gerard signed my copy of his book afterwards, I intended to talk to him about cats because I knew it was a subject he was passionate about, and he’d already answered one of my questions specifically regarding the films during the Q&A. I wanted to say something about how his Rosey looks like my childhood cat, Sophie O’Shea, and that his photographs always remind me of her. I wanted to say something about my Athena, to whom I would have referred using the present tense.
Gerard Malanga has extremely blue eyes. This is apparent even on black-and-white film. It’s one of his many striking features and one that has not changed with age. When he looked up at me from under his hat with those blue eyes which have witnessed so many scenes I’ll covet my whole life, all the conversational preparation went out of my head. Instead I just handed him my book and quickly thanked him for answering my question about working with Angus MacLise, to which he replied, “You’re very welcome,” in a terribly sincere tone.
What a privilege to have been young, once. What a privilege to have been able to grow old, when so many weren't. What a privilege to love the small creatures that we come across, for the time that they’re here.
—ECT
Visitors have to enter, rather than exit, through the gift shop, which I find beyond tacky.
CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK. The film is not available to watch online (or anywhere else), but this is a pretty detailed written description/interesting enough interpretation with a couple (nsfw!!) photographs. You know, if you simply must get the full context. Gerard is the guy in the striped shirt.
Like most people, I don’t count 1971’s Squeeze as a real VU album. Sorry, Doug. But I’ll concede that “Louise” is a really fun song.
Including John Cale (which Cale co-authored) and Lou Reed (which Reed loathed and attempted to litigate out of existence).
oh she was such a beautiful cat! & this was a lovely piece! when mine passed away a few years ago I was reading a Kim Addonizio collection with a poem about her cat dying ('cat poem' I think) and it really stayed with me - those deaths are so hard! <3
What a beautiful essay! It touched my heart Thank you.