From A to B and Back again
The Philosophies of Andy Warhol
Page 1 - 1975

I wake up and call B.
B is anybody who helps me kill time.
B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I.
I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be
with anybody.
I wake up and call B.
“Hello.”
“A? Wait and I’ll turn off the TV. And pee. I took a dehydration pill
and they make me pee every fifteen minutes.”
I waited for B to pee.
“Go on,” she said finally. “I just woke up. My mouth is dry.”
“I wake up every morning. I open my eyes and think: here we go
again.”
“I get up because I have to pee.”
“I never fall back to sleep,” I said. “It seems like a dangerous thing to
do. A whole day of life is like a whole day of television. TV never goes
off the air once it starts for the day, and I don’t either. At the end of the
day the whole day will be a movie. A movie made for TV.”
“I watch television from the minute I get up,” B said. “I look at NBC
blue, then I turn to another channel and look at the background in a
different color and see which way it looks better with the skin tones on
the faces. I memorize some of Barbara Walters’ lines so I can use them
on your TV show when you get it.”
B was referring to the great unfulfilled ambition of my life: my own
regular TV show. I’m going to call it Nothing Special.
“I wake up in the morning,” she said, “and look at the patterns of the
wallpaper. There’s gray and there’s a flower and there’re black dots
around the flower, and I’m thinking: is it Bill Blass wallpaper? It’s just
as famous as a painting. You know what you should do today, A? You
should find the best drawer-liner paper in New York and make a
portfolio out of it. Or have it made into material and go to an upholsterer
and have a chair covered with it. Have the flowers tufted. And you could
put accent pillows. You can do so much more with a chair than you can
with a painting.”
“That forty-pound shopping bag full of rice that I bought in a panic is
still sitting next to my bed,” I said.

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol

"In the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes" - Andy Warhol