I don’t read the East Bay Express as much as I used to since it lost its old-style Berkeley individuality and got swallowed up by the big alt-weekly chain that is now known as Village Voice Media. But I stumbled on this very funny interview in it today, in which a hapless music writer quizzes Lou Reed about his soundtrack for a new Tai Chi DVD.
I was in the audience last fall at the Web 2.0 conference when Reed’s iceberg-like self-possession collided with the tanker of the Web industry elite’s smug self-regard — a fiasco set up through the offices of then-AOL honcho Jonathan Miller, who explained that he and Reed met because they study with the same Tai Chi master. So Reed’s martial-arts enthusiasm didn’t come as the surprise to me that it seems to have for the Express writer.
What do you say to the people who can’t reconcile your classic Velvet Underground druggy image with this healthy New Age one?
“That was forty years ago!” he implores. “This is 2006! 2007! My God! I can’t worry about things like that. If I did, I wouldn’t do anything! I can’t live in 1967 for people. That’s crazy. I have a broader palette. Everything I do, I’ve always tried to do the best that I could as honestly as I could from wherever space I was viewing things at the time. I can’t satisfy everyone, and I’m not trying to.”
[tags]Lou Reed, martial arts, tai chi, dvds, east bay express[/tags]
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