Gary Indiana at Harper’s Magazine:
From time to time, Andy Warhol entertained the wish to host a television show called Nothing Special, and to operate a chain of cafeterias for solitary diners, the Andy-Mat. A social oddity since his Dickensian childhood, Warhol retained the imprint of not-having and not-belonging into adulthood, acquiring vivid people he didn’t much care about and pricey objects he never looked at. To a society poised to reject him, he presented a façade of detachment from other people’s lives, even from his own: in an interview with Alfred Hitchcock, he said that getting shot had been “like watching TV.”
What everybody knows about Warhol: He grew up in the Thirties and Forties in a cloacal, polyglot slough of Pittsburgh. He later said it was the worst place he had ever been.
more here.