Lou Reed – författare

The Art of the Straight Line captures the energy of Lou Reed's worlds of Tai Chi, music, and meditation. It was edited by his wife, the artist Laurie Anderson.Lou Reed was a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and founding member of the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground. He collaborated with many artists, from Andy Warhol and John Cale to Robert Wilson and Metallica. Reed had a groundbreaking solo career that spanned five decades until his death in 2013. Reed was also an accomplished martial artist whose practice began in the 1980s. He studied with Chen Tai Chi pioneer Master Ren GuangYi. This book is a comprehensive collection of Reed's writings on Tai Chi. It includes conversations with Reed's fellow musicians, artists, friends, and Tai Chi practitioners, including Julian Schnabel, A.M. Homes, Hal Willner, Mingyur Rinpoche, Eddie Stern, Tony Visconti, and Iggy Pop. The Art of the Straight Line features Reed's unpublished writings on the technique, practice, and purpose of martial arts, as well as essays, observations, and riffs on meditation and life.

A 2019 Music Book of the Year, THE TIMESOut of print for several years, a comprehensive volume of Lou Reed's lyrics with brand new introductions, now updated in a new text design to include the lyrics from his final album with Metallica, Lulu.Through his many incarnations-from proto punk to glam rocker to elder statesman of the avant garde Lou Reed's work has maintained an undeniable vividness and raw beauty, fueled by precise character studies and rendered with an admirable shot of moral ambiguity. Beginning with his formative days in the Velvet Underground and continuing through his remarkable solo albums like Transformer, Berlin, and New York, Doin' The Things We Want To is crucial to an appreciation of Lou Reed, not only as a consummate underground musician, but as one of the truly significant visionary lyricists of the rock n' roll era.Containing a body of work that spans more than six decades, this is a monument to the literary qualities of an American original.

In August of 1970, 28-year-old Lou Reed quit the Velvet Underground, moved home to Long Island, New York, and embarked on a fascinating alternate creative path: poetry. Spending months in relative isolation, the musician refashioned himself, publicly vowing to never again play rock and roll. Reed wrote verse and contributed his work to journals and small press publications. “I’m a poet,” he proclaimed from the stage of St. Mark’s Church in March 1971. Though his retirement from music wouldn’t last—only six months later he began recording his debut solo album—Reed’s passionate identification with the written word was solidified, and would last the rest of his life.Do Angels Need Haircuts? is an extraordinary snapshot of this turning point in Reed’s career. This book, the first to be produced by the Lou Reed Archive, gathers poems, photographs from the era—by Mick Rock, Moe Tucker, and others— as well as images from rare poetry zines. Featuring a new foreword by Anne Waldman, archival notes by Don Fleming, and an afterword by Laurie Anderson, Do Angels Need Haircuts? provides a window to a little-known chapter in the life of one of the most singular and uncompromising voices in American popular culture.