The Purple Decades Read Online Free PDF

nipples sitting up like hot cherries.
    Many prominent people are moving about in the hubbub, talking, drinking, staring: George Segal the movie actor, George Segal the sculptor, Leonard Lyons the columnist, Aileen Mehle, who is Suzy Knickerbocker the columnist; Alex Liberman; Mrs. Jacob Javits; Robert Kintner. Larry Poons comes in with his great curly head hung solemnly, wearing a terry cloth Hawaiian shirt with a picture of a shark on it. Poonsy! Spike calls him Poonsy. Her voice penetrates. It goes right through this boilup of heads, throats, tuxedoes. She says this is a big concession for Poonsy. She is talking about the Hawaiian shirt. This is formal for Poonsy. To some parties he wears a T-shirt and a pair of clodhoppers with Kelly green paint sloshed on them. Awash . People are pouring through all the rooms. Gong —the World’s Fair. Everybody leaves the apartment and goes downstairs to where they have three Campus Coach Line buses out on Fifth Avenue to take everybody out to the World’s Fair, out in Flushing.
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    The World’s Fair is over, but the Top o’ the Fair restaurant is still going, up in the top of a big mushroom tower. The wreckage of the fair, the half-demolished buildings, are all hulking around it in silhouette, like some gigantic magnified city dump. The restaurant itself, up
there at the top, turns out to be a great piece of 1930’s Mo-dren elegance, great slabs of glass, curved wood, wall-to-wall, and, everywhere, huge plate-glass views of the borough of Queens at night.
    Scull has taken over half the big complex at the top of the tower, including a whole bandstand and dance floor with tables around it, sort of like the old Tropicana night club in Havana, Cuba.
    After dinner a rock ‘n’ roll band starts playing and people start dancing. Mrs. Claes Oldenburg, a pretty, petite girl in a silver minidress, does a dance, the newest boogaloo, with Robert Rauschenberg, the artist. The band plays “Hang on, Sloopy.” Rauschenberg has had an outrageous smile on all evening and he ululates to himself from time to time—Ooooooooooo—Gong—the dancing stops and everybody is shepherded into a convention hall.
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    There is a movie screen in here and rows of seats. The lights go out. The first movie is called Camp , by Andy Warhol. A group of men and women in evening clothes are sitting in a very formal pose in a loft. One of them is Jane Holzer. A fat boy in some kind of Wagnerian opera costume comes out in front of them and does some ballet leaps, sagging and flopping about. The men and women in the evening clothes watch very stiffly and respectfully. Another fat boy comes out with a yo-yo act. A man in drag, looking like a faded Argentinian torch singer, comes out and does a crazy dance. The basic idea is pretty funny, all these people in evening clothes watching stiffly and respectfully while the performers come out and go into insane acts. It is also exquisitely boring. People start drifting out of the convention hall in the darkness at the Top o’ the Fair. So they stop that film, and the lights go on and a young man named Robert Whitman comes up and puts on his film, which has no title.
    This one is more elaborate. It involves three screens and three projectors. The lights go out. On the left screen, in color, a slender, good-looking girl, kind of a nude Culture bud, with long pre-Raphaelite hair and good beach skin, is taking a shower, turning this way and that. At first water comes out of the nozzle, and then something black, like oil, and then something red, like wine. She keeps waffling around. On the righthand screen, also in color, some nice-looking buds are lying on the floor with their mouths open. You’re looking down at their faces. Food and liquid start falling, cascading down, into their mouths, onto their faces, onto their noses, their eyes, all this stuff, something soft and mushy like pancake mix, then a thin liquid like pineapple