STONES & PASTE

When I read that Lou Reed, the poet of rock and roll had died yesterday, I was stunned. It's hard to explain the physical reaction that manifested itself, but I felt as though the air had been sucked out of me and there appeared a dull, painful sensation emerging from the leftt side of my head. I can understand death only logically--as the biological end of a once living organism, but I am never able to fully process it emotionally, especially if the person who has died has played such a enormous role in the development of my emotional life. I cannot express to you, whomever you are, what Lou Reed and his music meant to me without traversing space and time. I would lead you through those moments that we have all had that are so personal, that their impact is impossible to communicate to another human being without appearing hyperbolic or self-important. I would reveal to you as though you were Jimmy Stewart being led by his guardian angel in "It's A Wonderful Life", a bored and lonely kid positioned on the couch, feet in the air, upside down one Sunday morning listening listlessly to her Walkman until the opening bass notes to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," coolly saunters into her ears and invites her with its hypnotic spoken/sung chorus. I think that song was played twice to illustrate a point the radio deejays were making about why the lyrics, "she never lost her head/even when she was giving head" could be played on the air uncensored. The second time it was played, I made sure to listen intently to the lyrics. "And the colored girls go doo-doodoo-doodoo-doodoo-doo-doo-doodoo". That was my first exposure to Lou Reed's music. On the radio. Later on, I would buy all of the Velvet Underground's studio albums on CD and wear the shit out of them--all except "White Light, White Heat," which was the first one I bought. Though I found it exciting that they basically stuck a short story on a "rock and roll" track ("The Gift"), and it had "Sister Ray" on it, its uneven album structure didn't hold my attention as long as their previous ("Velvet Undergound and Nico") and subsequent records ("Velvet Underground", "Loaded," "VU"). Its merits were quickly eclipsed by their self-titled third album, whose words and music have lived with me since I was eighteen. Whereas "White Light/White Heat" issued a cacophony of glorious rock and roll noise with Reed's words speeding along on grooves paved by Morrison and Tucker and embellished by Cale's viola, it was with "Velvet Underground"
that I developed a personal connection with the depth in Reed's words. There are probably other lyrics in the history of recorded music that surpass the genius of those in "Candy Says." But I don't know of them. Rather, I haven't obsessed over them as I have Reed's lyrics in "Candy Says", particularly the lines "what do you think I'd see/if I could walk away from me?" and "I'm set free to find a new illusion" from "I'm Set Free". (Perspective is such a cornerstone of Reed's writing--the perspective of the young, the wild, the newly sober, the lost, the dying, the denizens of Max's Kansas City, CBGB's and Warhol's Factory, the working class of New York and Berlin...etc) So, it was with the "Velvet Underground" record that I accepted the words of Lou Reed into my heart.

To be continued...

"Between Thought and Expression Lies A Lifetime"

When you are young and trying to shape your own identity, you either take in whatever influences are readily available to you or you go and seek out the people from whom you eventually cobble together a version of the person you would like to be. I didn't have anybody in my life that I could model myself after as a kid because I couldn't relate to anybody I knew. Everybody was either physically and/or emotionally unavailable. So I haunted libraries and record stores (probably to the annoyance of the people who worked at these establishments--"Fuck! There she is again.") and found that the only people I could identify with were writers and musicians. So when I came across Lou Reed, somebody who was both steeped in literature, and rock n roll, the two things that sustained me as a young person, I decided that he would be the template against which I could fashion the kind of person I wanted to be. It sounds a bit preposterous I know because when some people listen to "Waiting for the Man" or "Heroin," and especially if the latter is the only song they know from his recorded output, they imagine a junkie writing about what it's like to be a junkie and "how could that be the kind of person a young person would want to learn anything from except how to drive a syringe into the right vein?" But I dare anybody to try to express an experience as intense as taking heroin in a seven minute rock song and get as close to the marrow as Reed did with just words and sonic textures. It's one thing to write about something and another to be able to encapsulate that thing so succinctly that the audience is able to feel the experience you have written about. It's like "dancing about architecture". Only hypnotists and artists of Reed's caliber are able to make that kind of transference possible. I tried to find out everything I could about Lou Reed's influences because I aspired to write like that and immediately bought a copy of Hubert Selby's "Last Exit To Brooklyn" from the local bookstore. To my dissatisfaction, I had just been admitted to college by the skin of my teeth and was dragging myself to classes I did not have much interest in. I dropped out not long after my first year as a Journalism major, but I remember reading "Last Exit To Brooklyn" in my first semester and being simultaneously traumatized and thrilled by it. Holy shit did it contain some heavy stuff! I would take that once-banned book with its picture of a nude woman on the cover to my classes like a badge of honor. "Yeah, if you only knew the kind of wretchedness and depravity contained within the pages of this book, you would not sit so close to me because I'm reading it!" I could see the parallels in Reed and Selby's work--what Reed must have mined from Selby's fierce disregard for literary conventions. Between dropping out and resuming my studies, I spent a year and a half reading voraciously (Delmore Schwartz's stories among them), observing the cast of characters who loitered the streets in the red light district where I worked, and working things out internally. Taking Reed as my example, I would return from figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and major in English Literature, even contemplating a transfer to Syracuse University before quickly discovering the campus was encompassed almost exclusively by nature and white people. I would complete my studies in San Francisco and move to New York City where two months before Lou Reed's passing, I would encounter him one afternoon on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and be too spineless to go over and tell him how much his words and his example enriched my life.

To be continued...

I always enjoyed reading or seeing clips of Lou Reed being interviewed by hapless journalists unprepared for the task of simply engaging in conversation with him. Reed's acerbic responses to interviewers who were too lazy to do their research on him made me giggle. I often thought, "They should have counted themselves lucky to be the object of his sharp-witted humor." It began to make sense to me after I read an article where he explained that he doesn't go into interviews with the intention of being difficult, but that if you have ever held a conversation with any self-respecting New Yorker, you'd understand the way he interacts with journalists. At its worst (where the bad interviewers are concerned) Reed's answers can be loaded with aggression, sarcasm, and/or dissolve into outright mockery of the journalist. But I've found, reading some of his more illuminating interviews recently (Neil Gaiman's interview and the 1992 Chicago Tribune interview in particular) that he could also let his guard down an inch (stop being "Lou Reed, the persona") and be the most intelligent and fascinating person to talk to. And having lived in New York for going on five years now, I can tell you that Lou Reed is absolutely right about the way New Yorkers talk to each other. You can get them to tell you anything you want to know, but first, you have to get in the ring with them. You gotta work for it, man. When I moved to New York from California, I gradually detected that overt difference in conversational tone between us mealy mouthed West Coast transplants and the unfiltered speech of the New York City natives, whose sentences are habitually punctuated by "fuckin'". When I discovered the music of the Velvets and Reed's solo work (I have more vivid, singular memories of listening to his albums than any other solo artist I can think of. Listening to "Transformer","Berlin," "Metal Machine Music," or "New York" still transports me back to very specific times in my life.), I also tried to learn more about the fecund artistic environment from which the Velvets incubated and sprang forth from. Coincidentally, there seemed to be a renewed interest or at least a resurgence of popularity for Pop Art around the same time that I began to dig deeper into the music. So I went to the Pop Art exhibits until they seemed repetitive and even defiantly sat through a screening of "Symphony of Sound (1967)," a film Andy Warhol made of The Velvet Underground practicing (by the time the film was over, there were about half a dozen people left in the theater including myself). I had romanticized the art and music scene of downtown New York in the 60's and 70's so much so that I didn't mind that the first paying job I ever held was in the seedy part of downtown San Francisco, where there were still pimps and hookers, crackheads, flophouses, homeless punks, and people who were generally just out of their goddamn minds, "'cause those were the characters Lou Reed wrote about!" I thought while cleaning the pee off of the carpet inside a thrift store dressing booth. And I can remember as clear as day as I sit here typing, the time this dude walked into the shop with short-cropped bleached blonde hair, black leather jacket and aviator glasses like Reed during his Rock and Roll Animal/Street Hassle period and for a second, in my head I thought, "Holy shit, that was Lou Reed," knowing full well that that was impossible.

To be continued.

It's not easy for television shows to gain momentum year after year, but this has been the best season of "Louie" so far. Besides the plethora of guest spots this season (Parker Posey's performance being the most interesting of them), we also saw a shift in the format of the show. Instead of easing viewers into the show's subject or tone with stand-up bits like the first two seasons, sometimes we are thrown right into it (as in Season 3, Ep. 5: "Barney/Never" which begins in black and white, no less) and left to figure out what's happening. It probably means Louis C.K. has become a more confident director/producer, but it also means he can write the hell out of an episode and he doesn't have to rely on the usual structural elements that have worked before in the previous seasons in crafting future episodes. Tonally, this season could be described as having a bit more of a serious edge to it than the first two, but I don't think the producers of the show are interested in making what could easily be hammered into a one-dimensional sitcom--here's a middle-aged stand-up comedian who is also a divorced single-parent with two daughters who tries his hand at dating while trying to be a good father--add an annoying neighbor and cue the laugh-track. Because what makes "Louie" funny does not even have that much to do with any contrived situations that Louie finds himself in as the protagonist, which is what most sitcoms are based on. What makes the show funny is the understanding that despite the unfunny shit that happens to us (the serious, mundane adult stuff), there is still something funny to be derived from our pathetic, ironic, cowardly, childish, knee-jerk , or just plain dumb reactions to them (ex. S3 Ep 7- Louie's dread of visiting his father.) Some people call it black comedy, but that describes about 75% of real life. Okay, maybe just my life.