Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist
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Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist
Daddy's Home (out May 14), Annie Clark's sixth album as St. Vincent, takes the sounds and sleaze of early-1970s New York as its aesthetic backdrop.
Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist
There's a scene in Torrey Peters' new novel,
Detransition, Baby, where two trans women argue over the enduring legacy of Candy Darling, one of the most memorable stars in Andy Warhol's orbit in late-'60s and early-'70s New York. One character asserts that she was little more than a muse, a blank canvas onto which men like Warhol and Lou Reed (who wrote about her in "Candy Says" and "Walk on the Wild Side") could project their fantasies: "just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous." In response, the other character lifts her skirt to reveal an enormous, photorealistic portrait of Darling's face tattooed across her thigh. A person's image, when separated from the person, can be tectonic in its meaning or appear as a cheap facsimile: It depends on how many times it's been replicated, the conditions of that replication, and, mostly, whom you ask.