Lou Reed's Tai Chi
The Kitchen Sisters Present
The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lou Reed, musician, rock icon, poet, leader of the legendary Velvet Underground, was obsessed with tai chi — the practice, the community, the health and spiritual benefits. Lou had been writing a book about this ancient martial art that was unfinished when he died in 2013.
Lou’s wife, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson, looked at Lou's unfinished work and decided the book needed to be completed, that there was something important to be shared in Lou’s long, life-altering journey with tai chi.
She turned to three of Lou's friends to help her with the project. By the time the book, The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi by Lou Reed, hit the stands in the spring of 2023, they had spoken with nearly 100 people and created a riveting portrait of Lou’s spiritual, medical and musical life, beckoning readers to enter the world of tai chi.
The Kitchen Sisters read the book and we kept thinking, these conversations must have been taped. We asked Laurie if there were recordings. There were. Dozens and dozens of them from rock stars, to tai chi masters, to doctors, to family….
We listened to the raw interviews, this remarkable trove of sound and story, and created a podcast that goes deep inside the making of this book. Voices heard in the story include Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Julian Schnabel, Hal Willner, Anohni, Master Ren and many more, plus archival recordings of Lou Reed.
The Kitchen Sisters Present: Lou Reed’s Tai Chi.
“Well, everybody does something, some people race cars, others collect stamps. I find tai chi to be philosophically, aesthetically, physically and spiritually fascinating.” — Lou Reed
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Radio Tophia, welcome to the Kitchen Sisters Presently. |
| 0:04.2 | PRX. |
| 0:05.6 | We're the Kitran Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nicki Silva. |
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| 1:13.2 | Thank you very much. |
| 1:14.3 | A few months back, a friend handed me a book, |
| 1:22.1 | the art of the Straight Line, My Tai Chi by Lou Reed. |
| 1:27.0 | I've been taking Tai Chi classes for several years, but really fell off the wagon during the pandemic and had never climbed back on. |
| 1:36.0 | Lou Reed, musician, rock icon, poet, leader of the legendary velvet underground, was obsessed with Tai Chi, |
| 1:44.0 | the practice, the community, the health and spiritual benefits, |
| 1:48.0 | and had been writing a book about this ancient martial art |
... |
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