10. Atmosphere

B: I wanted to make a film that showed how sad and lyrical it is for those two old ladies to be living in those rooms full of newspapers and cats.

A: You shouldn't make it sad. You should just say, "This is how people today are doing things."



Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.

The condominium has hot and cold running water, a few Heinz pickles thrown in, some chocolate-covered cherries, and when the Woolworth's hot fudge sundae switch goes on, then I know I really have something.

(This condominium meditates a lot: it's usually closed for the afternoon, evening, and morning.)

Your mind makes spaces into spaces. It's a lot of hard work. A lot of hard spaces. As you get older you get more spaces, and more compartments. And more things to put in the compartments.

To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space.

I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk.

Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Business Art is a much better thing to be making than Art Art, because Art Art doesn't support the space it takes up, whereas Business Art does. (If Business Art doesn't support its own space it goes out-of-business.)

So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e., I'm helping people waste their space when what I really want to do is help them empty their space.

I go even further in not following my own philosophy, because I can't even empty my own spaces. It's not that my philosophy is failing me, it's that I am failing my own philosophy. I breach what I preach more than I practice it.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.

My favorite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.

I believe that everyone should live in one big empty space. It can be a small space, as long as it's clean and empty. I like the Japanese way of rolling everything up and locking it away in cupboards. But I wouldn't even have the cupboards, because that's hypocritical. But if you can't go all the way and you really feel you need a closet, then your closet should be a totally separate piece of space so you don't use it as a crutch too much. If you live in New York, your closet should be, at the very least, in New Jersey. Aside from false dependency, another reason for keeping your cfoset at a good distance from where you live is that you don't want to feel you're living next door to your own dump. Another person's dump wouldn't bother you so much because you wouldn't Know exactly what was in it, but thinking about your own closet, and knowing every little thing that's in it, could drive you crazy.

Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out.

What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can't and you lose it, that's fine, because it's one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.

Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That's another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they're handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday.

There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, there'll be more waste than there should be. Everybody would always have something to sell back, so everybody would have money, because everybody would have something to sell. We all have something, but most of what we have isn't salable, there's such a preference today for brand new things. People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their old shampoo bottles, their old magazines. We have to get more organized. People who tell you we're running out of things are just making the prices go up higher. How can we be running out of anything when there's always, if I'm not mistaken, the same amount of matter in the Universe, with the exception of what goes into the black holes?

I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don't have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they'd never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn't even have to see it—it wouldn't even be dirty. If they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink. (I got the idea from thinking that bees shit honey, but then I found out that honey isn't bee-shit, it's bee regurgitation, so the honeycombs aren't bee bathrooms as I had previously thought. The bees therefore must run off somewhere else to do it.)

Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else's space for a while and pretend you're a part of it. You can sit in the Plaza Hotel and you don't even have to live there. You can just sit and watch the people go by.

There are different ways for individual people to take over space—to command space. Very shy people don't even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up, whereas very outgoing people want to take up as much space as they can get.

Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they're actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and least exclusively on television.

Some people must go crazy when they realize how much space they've managed to command. If you were the star of the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody's living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel?

I don't think anybody, no matter how famous they are in other fields, could ever feel as peculiar as a television star. Not even the biggest rock star whose records are playing on sound systems everywhere he goes could feel as peculiar as someone who knows he's on everybody's television regularly. No matter how small he is, he has all the space anyone could ever want, right there in the television box.

You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate and exclusive of all media—the telephone.

I've always had a conflict because I'm shy and yet I like to take up a lot of personal space. Mom always said, "Don't be pushy, but let everybody know you're around." I wanted to command more space than I was commanding, but then I knew I was too shy to know what to do with the attention if I did manage to get it. That's why I love television. That's why I feel that television is the media I'd most like to shine in. I'm really jealous of everybody who's got their own show on television.

As I said, I want a show of my own—called Nothing Special.

I'm impressed with people who can create new spaces with the right words. I only know one language, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I'll think, "Oh, this can't be right—this sounds very peculiar, I don't know if I should try to finish up this word or try to make it into something else, because if it comes out good it'll be right, but if it comes out bad it'll sound retarded," and so in the middle of words that are over one syllable, I sometimes get confused and try to graft other words on top of them. Sometimes this makes good journalism and when they quote me it looks good in print, and other times it's very embarrassing. You can never predict what will come out when the words you're saying start to sound strange to you and you start to patch.

I really love English—like I love everything else that's American—it's just that I don't do that well with it. My hairdresser keeps telling me that learning foreign languages is good for business (he knows five, but then the little kids in Europe giggle when he talks, so I don't know how well he really knows them) and he tells me I should learn at least one, but I just can't. I can hardly talk what I already talk, so I don't want to branch out.

I admire people who do well with words, though, and I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone every day until his mother told me to quit it.

I think a lot about "space writers"—the writers who get paid by how much they write. I always think quantity is the best gauge on anything (because you're always doing the same thing, even if it looks like you're doing something else), so I set my sights on becoming a "space artist." When Picasso died I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime and I thought, "Gee, I could do that in a day." So I started. And then I found out, "Gee, it takes more than a day to do four thousand pictures." You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day. And they'd all be masterpieces because they'd all be the same painting. And I started and I got up to about five hundred and then I stopped. But it took more than a day, I think it took a month. So at five hundred a month, it would have taken me about eight months to do four thousand masterpieces—to be a "space artist" and fill up spaces that I don't believe should be filled up anyway. It was disillusioning for me, to realize it would take me that long.

I like painting on a square because you don't have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it's just a square. I always wanted to do nothing but the same-size picture, but then somebody always comes along and says, "You have to do it a little bit bigger," or "A little bit smaller." You see, I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting. And if the one "master painting" is good, they're all good. Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting.

When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking, and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, "If you don't think about it, it's right." As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything. Leonardo da Vinci used to convince his patrons that his thinking time was worth something—worth even more than his painting time—and that may have been true for him, but I know that my thinking time isn't worth anything. I only expect to get paid for my "doing" time.

When I paint:

I look at my canvas and I space it out right. I think, "Well, over here in this corner it looks like it sort of belongs," and so I say, "Oh yes, that's where it belongs, all right." So I look at it again and I say, "The space in that corner there needs a little blue," and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too. And then it needs to be more spaced, so I take my little blue brush and I blue it over there, and then I take my green brush and I put my green brush on it and I green it there, and then I walk back and I look at it and see if it's spaced right. And then—sometimes it's not spaced right—I take my colors and I put another little green over there and then if it's spaced right I leave it alone.

Usually, all I need is tracing paper and a good light. I can't understand why I was never an abstract expressionist, because with my shaking hand I would have been a natural.

I got a little into technology a couple of times. One of the times was when I thought it was the end of my art. I thought I was really really finished, so to mark the end of my art career I made silver pillows that you could just fill up with balloons and let fly away. I made them for a performance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And then it turned out they didn't float away and we were stuck with them, so I guessed I wasn't really finished with art, since there I was, back again, putting anchors on the pillows. I had actually announced I was retiring from art. But then the Silver Space Pillows didn't float away and my career didn't float away, either. Incidentally, I've always said that silver was my favorite color because it reminded me of space, but now I'm thinking that over.

Another way to take up more space is with perfume.

I really love wearing perfume.

I'm not exactly a snob about the bottle a cologne comes in, but I am impressed with a good-looking presentation. It gives you confidence when you're picking up a well-designed bottle.

People have told me that the lighter your skin, the lighter the color perfume you should use. And vice-versa. But I can't limit myself to one range. (Besides, I'm sure hormones have a lot to do with how a perfume smells on your skin—I'm sure the right hormones can make Chanel No. 5 smell very butch.)

I switch perfumes all the time. If I've been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.

Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they've got. I never look at anything else— I don't snoop—but I'm compulsive about seeing if there's some obscure perfume I haven't tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven't smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can't stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I'm paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.

Of the five senses, smell has the closest thing to the full power of the past. Smell really is transporting. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something. Usually I don't want to, but by having smells stopped up in bottles, I can be in control and can only smell the smells I want to, when I want to, to get the memories I'm in the mood to have. Just for a second. The good thing about a smell-memory is that the feeling of being transported stops the instant you stop smelling, so there are no aftereffects. It's a neat way to reminisce.

My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn't start wearing lots of them until the early 60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever. I loved the way the lobby of the Paramount Theater on Broadway used to smell. I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? i can't ever smell it again. Sometimes I picture a botany book in the future saying something like, "The lilac is now extinct. Its fragrance is thought to have been similar to—?" and then what can they say? Maybe they'll be able to give it as a chemical formula. Maybe they already can.

I used to be afraid I would eventually run through and use up all the good colognes and there'd be nothing left but things like "Grape" and "Musk." But now that I've been to the profumerias of Europe and seen all the colognes and perfumes they have there, I don't worry any more.

I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:

Guerlain's: "Sous le Vent"

Lucien Le Long's: "Jabot," "Gardenia," "Mon Image,"

"Opening Night" Prince Matchabelli's: "Princess of Wales" in memory

of Alexandra Ciro's: "Surrender," "Reflexions" Lentheric's: "A Bientot," "Shanghai," "Gardenia de

Tahiti" Worth's: "Imprudence"

Marcel Rochas': "Avenue Matignon," "Air Jeune"

D'Orsay's: "Trophee," "Le Dandy," "Toujours Fidele," "Belle de Jour"

Coty's: "A Suma," "La Fougeraie au Crepuscule" (Fernery at Twilight)

Corday's: "Tzigane," "Possession," "Orchidee Bleue," "Voyage a Paris"

Chanel's: brisk "Cuir de Russie" (Russian Leather); romantic "Glamour"; melting "Jasmine"; tender "Gardenia"

Molinelle's: "Venez Voir"

Houbigant's: "Countryclub," "Demi-Jour" (Twilight)

Bonwit Teller's: "721"

Helena Rubinstein's: "Town," "Country"

Weil's: Eau de Cologne "Carbonique"

Kathleen Mary Quinlan's: "Rhythm"

Lengyel's (pronounced "len-jel"): "Imperiale Russe"

Chevalier Garde's: "H.R.R.," "Fleur de Perse," "Roi

de Rome" Saravel's: "White Christmas"

When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill, Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-fountain drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Bren-tano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboro, Bookmasters, Barnes & Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple—and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.

I know from experience that I prefer city space to country space. I love the idea of being in the country, but then when I get there it comes back to me that:

I love to walk but I can't

I love to swim but I can't

I love to sit in the sun but I can't

I love to smell the flowers but I can't

I love to play tennis but I can't

I love to water-ski but I can't

The list could run longer, but that's the idea, and the reason "I can't" is simply because I'm not the type. You just can't do things that you're not the type to do. You can say things that you're not the type to say, but you can't do things that you're not the type to do. It's a bad idea.

Also, when I'm in the country, I love to watch television but I can't, because the reception is usually too bad.

(By the way, people will often try to convince you to do something by saying that it doesn't matter if you're not the type, or that you could be the type if you wanted to be, but don't break down and try to do something that you're not the type to do, because you know what type you are, nobody else does.)

I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.

Another reason I like the city better than the country is that in the city everything is geared to working, and in the country everything is geared to relaxation. I like working better than relaxing. In the city, even the trees in the parks work hard because the number of people they have to make oxygen and chlorophyll for is staggering. If you lived in Canada you might have a million trees making oxygen for you alone, so each of those trees isn't working that hard. Whereas a tree in a treepot in Times Square has to make oxygen for a million people. In New York you really do have to hustle, and the trees know this, too—just look at them. The other day on 57th Street, I was walking and I was looking at the new, sloping Solow building across the street and I walked straight into a treepot. I was embarrassed because there was no way at all to carry it off. I just fell on top of this tree on West 57th Street because I wasn't ready for it to be there.

Somehow, the way life works, people usually wind up either in crowded subways and elevators, or in big rooms all by themselves. Everybody should have a big room they can go to and everybody should also ride the crowded subways.

Usually people are very tired when they ride on a subway, so they can't sing and dance, but I think if they could sing and dance on a subway, they'd really enjoy it.

The kids who spray graffiti all over the subway cars at night have learned how to recycle city space very well. They go back into the subway yards in the middle of the night when the cars are empty and that's when they do their singing and their dancing on the subway. The subways are like palaces at night with all that space just for you.

Ghetto space is wrong for America. It's wrong for people who are the same type to go and live together. There shouldn't be any huddling together in the same groups with the same food. In America it's got to mix 'n' mingle. If I were President, I'd make people mix 'n' mingle more. But the thing is America's a free country and I couldn't make them.

I believe in living in one room. One empty room with just a bed, a tray, and a suitcase. You can do everything either from your bed or in your bed—eat, sleep, think, get exercise, smoke—and you would have a bathroom and a telephone right next to the bed.

Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed, anyway. Even peeling potatoes.

Suitcase space is so efficient. A suitcase full of everything you need:

One spoon

One fork

One plate

One cup

One shirt

One underwear

One sock

One shoe

One suitcase and one empty room. Terrific. Perfect.

By living in one room you eliminate a lot of worries. But the basic worries, unfortunately, remain:

Are the lights on or off?

Is the water off?

Are the cigarettes out?

Is the back door closed?

Is the elevator working?

Is there anyone in the lobby?

Who's that sitting in my lap?

People are sleeping in pyramid-shaped spaces a lot now because they think it will keep them young and vital and stop the aging process. I'm not worried about that because I have my wings. However, my ideal too is the pyramid-look, because you don't have to think about a ceiling. You want to have a roof over your head, so why not let your walls also be your ceiling, so you have one less thing to think about—one less surface to look at, one less surface to clean, one less surface to paint. The tepee-dwelling Indians had the right idea. A cone might be nice if circles didn't exclude the edges and if you could find the right round sink, but I prefer an equilateral-triangular pyramidal-shaped enclosure even more than a square-based pyramid shape, because with a triangular base you have one less wall to think about, and one less corner to dust.

My ideal city would be one long Main Street with no cross streets or side streets to jam up traffic. Just one long oneway street. With one tall vertical building where everybody lived with:

One elevator

One doorman

One mailbox

One washing machine

One garbage can

One tree out front

One movie theater next door

Main Street would be very very wide, and all you'd have to say to someone to make them feel good is, "I saw you on Main Street today."

And you'd fill your car up with gas and drive across the street.

My ideal city would be completely new. No antiques. All the buildings would be new. Old buildings are unnatural spaces. Buildings should be built to last for a short time. And if they're older than ten years, I say get rid of them. I'd build new buildings every fourteen years. The building and the tearing down would keep people busy, and the water wouldn't be rusty from old pipes.

Rome, Italy, is an example of what happens when the buildings in a city last too long.

They call Rome "The Eternal City" because everything is so old and everything is still standing. They always say, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it. Replacing necessities keeps people busy. The necessities, they always say, are food, shelter, and clothing. Now, in Italy they make a lot of food, and they make a lot of clothing, but food and clothing are only two-thirds of the necessities, the other third is shelter—and they're not making that because it's already been made. So what's happened in Rome is that the women wind up in the kitchens making all the food and in the factories sewing all the clothes, while the men don't do anything because the buildings are already built and they're not falling down! Their buildings were originally built too well and they've never corrected the situation. This is why you see so many men on the streets of Rome, Italy, at all hours of the day and night.

The best, most temporal way of making a building that I ever heard of is by making it with light. The Fascists did a lot of this "light architecture." If you build buildings with lights outside, you can make them indefinite, and then when you're through using them you shut the lights off and they disappear. Hitler always needed buildings in a hurry to make speeches from, so his architect created these "buildings" for him that were illusion buildings, completely constructed by lighting effects, where he defined a very big space.

Holograms are going to be exciting, I think. You can really, finally, with holograms, pick your own atmosphere. They'll be televising a party, and you want to be there, and with holograms, you will be there. You'll be able to have this 3-D party in your house, you'll be able to pretend you're there and walk in with the people. You can even rent a party. You can have anybody famous that you want sitting right next to you.

I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But when you hit one of the two, people turn the lights out on you, or spit on you, or write bad reviews of you, or beat you up, or mug you, or say you're "climbing." But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens. Believe me, because I've made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That's one thing I really do know about.

When people have a cool, calm atmosphere about them, they're usually spaced. They have those right kind of eyes, and they sit around and not bother anybody. Some people are like that naturally because of their chemicals, and other people are like that because of drugs. They think they're thinking—about something.

Energy helps you fill up more space, but if I had more energy than usual, I'd probably not want to fill up more space—I'd be in my room cleaning a lot. I'll say this for diet pills: they make you think small, and when you think small, you do a lot of cleaning up. Real energy makes you want to run down the beach doing cartwheels even if you can't do them. But diet-pill energy helps you fill up less space because it makes you want to recopy address books while you talk for an hour about running down the beach doing cartwheels. Diet pills make you want to dust and flush things down the john.

In New York you have to clean so much, and when you're finished, it's not-dirty. In Europe people clean so much, and when they're finished, it's not just not-dirty, it's clean. Also, it seems so much easier to entertain in Europe than in New York. You just throw open the doors to the garden and eat out in the open air with flowers and trees all around. Whereas New York is funny, most of the time things just don't come off. In Europe, even having tea in the back yard can be wonderful. But in New York it's complicated—if the restaurant is nice, the food can be bad and if the food is good, the lighting can be bad, and if the lighting is good, the air circulation can be bad.

And New York restaurants now have a new thing—they don't sell their food, they sell their atmosphere. They say, "How dare you say we don't have good food, when we never said we had good food. We have good atmosphere." They caught on that what people really care about is changing their atmosphere for a couple of hours. That's why they can get away with just selling their atmosphere with a minimum of actual food. Pretty soon when food prices go really up, they'll be selling only atmosphere. If people are really all that hungry, they can bring food with them when they go out to dinner, but otherwise, instead of "going out to dinner" they'll just be "going out to atmosphere."

My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, American lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft's and the old-style Chock Full O' Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I'm truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing. No matter what changes or how fast, the one thing we all always need is real good food so we can know what the changes are and how fast they're coming. Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, "An orange what?"

I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—"The Restaurant for the Lonely Person." You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

Today my favorite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere. If I didn't have to think about the idea that airplanes go up in the air and fly it would be my perfect atmosphere. Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite loudspeaker address systems, my favorite conveyor belts, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and the best optimism. I love the way you don't have to think about where you're going, someone else is doing that, but I just can't get over the crazy feeling I get when I look out and see the clouds and know I'm really up-there. The atmosphere is great, it's the idea of flying that I question. I guess I'm not an air person, but I'm on an air schedule, so I have to live an air life. I'm embarrassed that I don't like to fly because I love to be modern, but I compensate by loving airports and airplanes so much.

The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because it's three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.