Lou Reed and Rebecca
Oct. 28th, 2013 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraFor me, the most amazing thing about Lou Reed is that he actually managed to qualify for a liver transplant. Figure someone at the HRSA has a secret history as a mosh pit trawler.
I'm not a big fan of Reed's early stuff with the Velvets at all though I like his Edgar Allan Poe tribute album a lot. He was part of a triumvirate of wizened old rock 'n' roll troubadours that also includes Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. (Them I do like.) In death, he's most instructive as a cautionary tale, how the pyrotechnic sizzle and boom of Youth invariably gives way to the agoraphobia and liver disease of Old Age. It is the blight that man was born for, etcetera, ad nauseam.
My first impulse upon hearing that Lou Reed had croaked was to text B.
I quickly stifled it, though. B suffers from the same liver disease that Lou Reed suffered from. It's a Boomer epidemic: The CDC estimates that something like as many as one out of every 25 Boomers have Hep C. When last I spoke to B about his liver, it was operating at around 35%. He was supposed to start either interferon or some other miracle drug regimen in August, but was clearly uncomfortable discussing it -- which is to his credit: Most people with chronic, incurable diseases have a hard time talking about anything other than their chronic, incurable diseases. It's sort of like their world shrinks to the perimeter of their immune systems.
First thing I did after B was diagnosed was to rush out and get myself tested. I'm clean.
I think I passed Lou and Laurie on a NYC street not so very long ago. He was very short, which came as kind of a shock because I always think of subjects that inspire that kind of photographic iconography as tal-l-l-l... Probably because I worked around models for so long.
Lou Reed's death came at the end of a reflective weekend. I crammed a lot of social stuff into last week, which was unusual for me. I have major intimacy issues though -- you didn't know? --so coming home on the train from ___________, I could feel myself growing more and more depressed. I watched rural horse country morph into the suburbs, and the suburbs morph into Bronx urban blight, through the windows of the train. It was like time lapse photography. I felt my own insignificance -- purple speck of coral on a pink and cream coral reef -- and that insignificance oppressed me. I won't need a liver transplant, but I'll die nonetheless, probably in some drab hospital room tended by people who won't love me.
I chased these cheerful thoughts away by hanging out with Rutger. He's very talkative -- trills and meows more than any other cat I've ever known. And also by rereading my favorite Edgar Eager books, Half Magic and The Time Garden, and a bad historical novel (Penmarric), and by watching Hitchcock's Rebecca.
Rebecca really needs someone to do for it what Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea did for Jane Eyre. In terms of modern culture, Rebecca de Winter is an entirely sympathetic heroine, a free spirit dragooned into marriage to an awful chauvinist pig, and wistfully trying to work out a compromise that would allow her to have a life but at the same time fulfill her responsibilities. And she gets murdered for it. One senses Hitchcock would have been on board for that, but the stipulations of the Hayes Code would never have allowed it.
I'm going up to Syracuse this weekend to visit RTT. It's Parents Day weekend at Syracuse University! "Maybe they'll organize a tour of Lou Reed's dorm room for visiting parents!" said B, but that's the only thing he said about Lou Reed.
I'm not a big fan of Reed's early stuff with the Velvets at all though I like his Edgar Allan Poe tribute album a lot. He was part of a triumvirate of wizened old rock 'n' roll troubadours that also includes Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. (Them I do like.) In death, he's most instructive as a cautionary tale, how the pyrotechnic sizzle and boom of Youth invariably gives way to the agoraphobia and liver disease of Old Age. It is the blight that man was born for, etcetera, ad nauseam.
My first impulse upon hearing that Lou Reed had croaked was to text B.
I quickly stifled it, though. B suffers from the same liver disease that Lou Reed suffered from. It's a Boomer epidemic: The CDC estimates that something like as many as one out of every 25 Boomers have Hep C. When last I spoke to B about his liver, it was operating at around 35%. He was supposed to start either interferon or some other miracle drug regimen in August, but was clearly uncomfortable discussing it -- which is to his credit: Most people with chronic, incurable diseases have a hard time talking about anything other than their chronic, incurable diseases. It's sort of like their world shrinks to the perimeter of their immune systems.
First thing I did after B was diagnosed was to rush out and get myself tested. I'm clean.
I think I passed Lou and Laurie on a NYC street not so very long ago. He was very short, which came as kind of a shock because I always think of subjects that inspire that kind of photographic iconography as tal-l-l-l... Probably because I worked around models for so long.
Lou Reed's death came at the end of a reflective weekend. I crammed a lot of social stuff into last week, which was unusual for me. I have major intimacy issues though -- you didn't know? --so coming home on the train from ___________, I could feel myself growing more and more depressed. I watched rural horse country morph into the suburbs, and the suburbs morph into Bronx urban blight, through the windows of the train. It was like time lapse photography. I felt my own insignificance -- purple speck of coral on a pink and cream coral reef -- and that insignificance oppressed me. I won't need a liver transplant, but I'll die nonetheless, probably in some drab hospital room tended by people who won't love me.
I chased these cheerful thoughts away by hanging out with Rutger. He's very talkative -- trills and meows more than any other cat I've ever known. And also by rereading my favorite Edgar Eager books, Half Magic and The Time Garden, and a bad historical novel (Penmarric), and by watching Hitchcock's Rebecca.
Rebecca really needs someone to do for it what Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea did for Jane Eyre. In terms of modern culture, Rebecca de Winter is an entirely sympathetic heroine, a free spirit dragooned into marriage to an awful chauvinist pig, and wistfully trying to work out a compromise that would allow her to have a life but at the same time fulfill her responsibilities. And she gets murdered for it. One senses Hitchcock would have been on board for that, but the stipulations of the Hayes Code would never have allowed it.
I'm going up to Syracuse this weekend to visit RTT. It's Parents Day weekend at Syracuse University! "Maybe they'll organize a tour of Lou Reed's dorm room for visiting parents!" said B, but that's the only thing he said about Lou Reed.
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I hate when other people do this to me but...
Date: 2013-10-28 05:41 pm (UTC)I know this really great writer who is terrific at descriptions, not a fan of plot, knows all the cultural subtexts of Rebecca the book etc.
Re: I hate when other people do this to me but...
Date: 2013-10-28 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-29 02:41 am (UTC)Anyway, this is the first celebrity death that's had a measurable effect on me for a long time. Since the first time I listened to the Velvets in, oh, say '84? I've been a big fan of his. Albeit third in your line of troubadours...
no subject
Date: 2013-10-29 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-29 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-29 02:08 pm (UTC)(I did a really great interview w/Crosby once back in the days when I was working for People Mag. He'd recently gotten his first liver. (Since then he's gotten at least one more.) People flew me down to Santa Barbara and I spent the afternoon w/Crosby and his long-suffering wife Jan in their San Ysidro house. He's quite a charming guy, if feckless. I can't speak to his musical abilities -- the Byrds never did anything for me, I hated that droning guitar.)
I've been mulling Lou Reed over in my mind all morning, trying to figure out why I didn't like his earlier songs, the ones everyone else likes. I'm tempted to say it's because drugs and gender-bending aren't universal in the way, say, that loving a girl from the North Country or looking between the garbage and the flowers are, but of course that merely reflects my own narrow biases.
I'd say Reed was more of a poet than a songwriter, but that's not a compliment. He's a poet in the tradition of Baudelaire and Allen Ginsberg, neither of whom I like particularly. He just set his poems to a single guitar cord.
I suppose you could argue that Dylan is also a poet, but I think he's both -- a poet and a songwriter. I think it's very hard to write a good song. The structure is deceptively simple and repetitive. I think Dylan seeped himself so long in the folk tradition that when he finally broke out from it, it was still in his marrow. Dylan can't help writing great songs whatever musical genre he's working it. He has a gift for archetypal imagery, amplified no doubt by all those years apprenticing Woody Guthrie.
Obviously Lou Reed's images are archetypal for many people. But they're not for me. Neither is the screechy, over-the-top imagery in works like Naked Lunch or Howl. (Although I do have quite an appreciation for Burroughs' later collage stuff.)
I guess I'm kind of old fashioned in my tastes in poetry and songs. For whatever reason, I have really pristine, classical tastes -- I like stuff with rhymes and meter that suggest rather than state. Auden and Yeats are my two favorite poets. Too bad Lou Reed never did a Yeats tribute album. That would be worth listening to.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-29 04:35 pm (UTC)I'd say I'm a Lou Reed fan, though not rabidly so, as stated elsewhere.
The only celebrity deaths that really choked me up were Johnny Cash and Walter Payton from the Chicago Bears (the latter visited my grade school). It's odd mourning people you admire but don't know. Depends what emotional chords they struck with you, I guess. I'm not even that rabid of a Johnny Cash fan; I think it was the tormented soul thing and because he just seemed so fatherly.
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Date: 2013-10-29 04:59 pm (UTC)Yr friend's concert experience unleashes the simmering loathing I have for Lou Reed. The self-entitled junkie morphed into a self-entitled aging rock 'n' roll elder. Yuck. Keith Richards at least has a sense of humor.
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Date: 2013-10-29 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-30 11:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-30 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-30 01:03 pm (UTC)I guess she's no longer a soprano! :-)
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Date: 2013-11-02 06:31 pm (UTC)Yes! I've said this myself many times. I get looked at like I've spoken a heresy.
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Date: 2013-11-02 10:15 pm (UTC)I would say thematically it's very equivalent to the stuff that Andy Warhol was doing artistically around the same time -- which, oddly enough, I find very interesting. Maybe that's because I draw a little bit (so can follow Warhol's processes a little) but I don't play an instrument? Dunno.