Free The Lonely City by Olivia Laing Page B

irrepressible speed-queen and greatest of all the Factory’s supernaturally gifted talkers. Charming and unstable, he appeared in many of Warhol’s films of the period, most notably Chelsea Girls, in which he can be seen flying into one of his notorious rages and slapping Rona Page twice around the face for calling him a phoney.
    Ondine was a quicksilver presence. A photograph taken around the time of a’s taping catches him in a rare moment of stillness, out in the street, head turned to confront the camera – a handsome man in aviators and a black t-shirt, his dark hair falling in a quiff over his eyes, an airline flight bag slung over his shoulder, his mouth in the characteristic pout-cum-smirk that Warhol describes in POPism as being ‘pure Ondine, a sort of quizzical duck’s mouth with deep smile lines around it’.
    The original plan was to follow him for twenty-four hours straight. Recording began in the afternoon of Friday, 12 August 1965, but after twelve hours and despite copious consumption of amphetamines Ondine began to flag (‘you have finished me off’). The remainder was taped later, in three sessions over the summer of 1966 and one in May 1967. The twenty-four cassettes were then transcribed by four different typists, all of them young women. The pool comprised Maureen Tucker, later the drummer in The Velvet Underground, Susan Pile, a student at Barnard, and two high school girls. They approached their task in a variety of ways, some erratically identifying speakers and some failing to distinguish between voices at all. None were professional typists. Tucker refused to transcribe swear words, while one of the girls’mothers threw away an entire section, horrified by the language.
    Warhol insisted that all these errors be preserved, alongside the many infelicities of transcription and spelling. As such, a is resistant if not actively antagonistic to the production of understanding. Reading it is confusing, amusing, baffling, alienating, boring, infuriating, thrilling; a crash course in how speech binds and isolates, conjoins and freezes out.
    Where are we? Hard to tell. In the street, in a coffee shop, in a cab, on a roof terrace, in a bathtub, on the phone, at a party, surrounded by people popping pills and playing opera at full blast. Everywhere is the same place really: the empire of the Silver Factory. But you have to imagine the interiors. No one describes their location, just as in a conversation one doesn’t stop to itemise the elements of the room in which it’s taking place.
    The effect is like being shipwrecked in a sea of voices, a surf of unattributed speech. Voices in the background, voices vying for space, voices drowned out by opera, inconsequential voices, unintelligible garble, voices running into one another: an endless barrage of gossip, anecdote, confession, flirtation, plan; language taken to the threshold of meaning, abandoned language, language past the point of caring, language disintegrating into pure sound; OW-UH-mmmmm. I dunno what the wor dis. Oooooo-mmm-mmm, through which the voice of Maria Callas perpetually seeps, itself gloriously deformed.
    Who’s talking? Drella, Taxi, Lucky, Rotten, the Duchess, DoDo, the Sugar Plum Fairy, Billy Name, a parade of cryptic, unstable nicknames and noms de plume. Do you understand or don’t you? Are you in or out? Like any game, it’s all about belonging. ‘Theonly way to talk is to talk in games, it’s just fabulous,’ Ondine says and Edie Sedgwick, disguised as Taxi, replies: ‘Ondine has games that no one understands.’
    People who can’t keep up, who slow the flow, are cast literally to the margins. In one of the most disturbing sequences, Taxi and Ondine are joined by a French actress, whose repeatedly ignored interjections are placed on the far side of the page, away from the main stream of conversation, the text shrunken to denote the tiny tininess of an ignored voice, caught in the echo chamber of exclusion. Elsewhere,