The Lou Reed issue May June 2003

[GeneChing]

Back in May June 2003, (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=318) with one of our more expermental covers, we went with veteran rocker Lou Reed. It raised more than a few eyebrows amongst our readers, but it has risen to become our most high profile cover ever. It appears in the current issue of NME (http://www.NME.com)(30 September 2006) on page 5. I'm starting this thread because Lou Reed's work with Taiji is continuing worth collating here.

Here's the original cover story:
Lou Reed:a Walk on the Wild Side of Tai Chi (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=325) by Martha Burr
Here's another article Martha did on Reed:
Lou Reed: The Taiji Raven Speaks (On Tour 2003) (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=497)

Reed took the cover picture of AOL CEO Jon Miller (another experimental cover) for our March April 2006 issue (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=646). Here's the discussion thread about that issue (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40394) too.

We also covered Reed's performance with Master Ren Guang-yi at the Olympics in our July August 2006 issue (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=660) in Martial Arts as Performance Art: From Opera to the Olympics By Stephan Berwick

Reed was also featured in Entertainment Weekly with our got qi shirt (http://www.martialartsmart.net/95-036w.html). There's a thread on that somewhere, which I'll find later. There were more reprints of that cover too - I'll dig those out as I come across them.

Reed also was a guest of honor at our 10th Anniversary Benefit although he didn't perform. Too bad, that would have sent our benefit DVDs (http://www.martialartsmart.net/dvdca107set.html) over the top.

[GeneChing]

He played at this intimate little theater in Redwood City, the Fox (http://www.loureed.org/00/index.html), of all places. Awesome show. I was very impressed. It was only him, his long-time collaborator Fernando Saunders, and the one and only Rob Wasserman. Gigi and I went as special guests and we had a blast. More to come... ;)

[GeneChing]

Jonathon Miller, CEO of AOL, introduces Lou Reed last night, calling him a poet, a writer, a musician, and the person who introduced him to his kung-fu mentor. What the?

Lou Reed at the Web 2.0 SummitSo Lou Reed gets on stage with two accompanying musicians, flanked by large video screens zoomed in directly on his weathered face. He begins playing a song to the buttoned down and sitting down Web 2.0 crowd. Meanwhile there’s an audible drone of people talking in the back of the large room.

Between songs Lou looks ****ed, but I think that’s normal. He tells the crowd, “You can keep on talking, I’ve only got 20 minutes. Or I can turn up the music. I can turn it up so loud it will hurt. Do you want me to turn it up? Do you want me to make it hurt?” (rough paraphrase). How awkward.

He’s met with some faint cheering/clapping to turn it up, so over the mike to his sound guy, he growls, “Frank turn it up!” Frank probably thought he was joking. Lou repeats himself once or twice: “Frank, turn it up, Frank turn up the sound!”

The sound gets cranked up, the conversation in the back of the room gets drowned out (or stops). A sense of shock travels through the audience. ****, we ****ed off Lou! People are still sitting. Except for one Tim O’Reilly, who gets up and does his signature West County snake-charmer dance across the auditorium.

By the time he makes his way across the whole room, he’s in front of me and Melanie, so I figure, what the heck, he’s got balls, I might as well stand up. Melanie follows suit, but we’re the only two people standing, clapping, as Tim bounces around the room.

By the time the song ends, the attendees, who are either impressed by Tim’s gall, or Lou’s, finally get off their feet for the rest of the performance, including the song “Sweet Jane.”

At one point Lou muses on his predicament: “Who would have thought it would come to this. I’d be playing at a cyberspace conference, brought here by AOL, introduced by my kung-fu brother.”
See justinsomnia.org (http://justinsomnia.org/2006/11/lou-reed-20/) - he's got a vid link too.

[GeneChing]

I found that Lou Reed got qi thread (http://forum.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25792). :cool:

[GeneChing]

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/1376604_10152040748864363_965658609_n.jpg

Here's a video that was sent to us today by one of Lou's classmates under Ren Guangyi, Scott Richman.

Lou Reed Tai Chi Photos set to original music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNSQ-R_HxTM&sns=em)

[Stickgrappler]

:(

RIP Lou Reed

[humbleman]

Thanks for the great memories your music is a part of.

[GeneChing]

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/993665_10152043007244363_489214138_n.jpg

Lou Reed 1942-2013 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=1129)

[humbleman]

Purchased the issue and brought it to class to show my Shaolin-Do Sensei. Asked him to explain Chen style Tai Chi to me - he did so, and then said 'It looks kind of like this" - and went into a flawless demonstration of same. My jaw dropped. :D
Lou Reed's wry sense of humor shows here!

[GeneChing]

The cover of our MAY+JUNE 2003 issue appears in Dirty Blvd. The Life and Music of Lou Reed (http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Blvd-Life-Music-Reed/dp/161373106X) by Aidan Levy, Chicago Review Press 2016.

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfl1/t31.0-8/12183924_10153793607659363_3831016575245493447_o.j pg

[GeneChing]

“Hello Little Bonehead, I’ll Love You Forever”: Laurie Anderson On Buddhism, Lou Reed, And Her Piano-Playing Dog (http://junkee.com/hello-little-bonehead-ill-love-you-forever-laurie-anderson-on-buddhism-lou-reed-and-her-piano-playing-dog/66042)
By Annabel Brady-Brown, 28/9/2015 2827

http://junkee.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/19454-Laurie_Anderson_-_Heart_of_a_Dog_1-feature-768x512.jpg

In a 2012 interview, Laurie Anderson advised artists to “call themselves multimedia artists. Then no one can criticise you when you do something else, when you make a film or a book.”

In another piece, she added, “Genres are for bins”. Taking her own advice, the legendary American musician, visual- and performance artist, writer and tech-head deftly snuck into the world of cinema this month with Heart of a Dog: a film about the death of her rat terrier Lolabelle.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ly_3i-jyes

Anderson’s love of dogs is well-documented. In 2010, she came to Australia for Vivid Sydney festival, which she curated with her husband Lou Reed. On the program was the debut of her original composition ‘Music For Dogs’: 20 minutes of bizarre, high-frequency noise art, played at the Sydney Opera House forecourt for an audience of a thousand dogs.

When I meet her, Anderson is sitting in a hotel conference room during this month’s Venice International Film Festival, a week after Heart of a Dog’s world premiere in Telluride. Glowing reviews have been pouring in since. “I’ve been having a really good time here,” she says. The 68-year-old smiles warmly at each of the six journalists crowded around her, dictaphones poised, before she slips into the trippy storytelling mode she has mastered over the past four decades. As in her musical and spoken-word performances, from her 1981 avant-pop hit ’O Superman’ through to recent shows born from her time as NASA’s first artist-in-residence, Anderson’s anecdotes oscillate from witty and razor sharp, to philosophical or dreamy. Each word is carefully weighed, paused, enunciated like a spell.

The film, too, lyrically rambles. Topics such as the death of Lolabelle, of Anderson’s mother, the near-death of her brothers, SIDS, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 9/11, Wittgenstein and Homeland Security, all gracefully tumble into place in the strange and poetic personal cine-essay.

She Inherits Lou Reed’s Weapons

“Sometimes you’re going to be seeing through the eyes of a dog, sometimes through the lens of a surveillance camera, sometimes you’re going to be flying,” Anderson says, smiling like we’re all about to drop acid together. The journey through Heart of a Dog inhabits these multiple perspectives to examine its greater subjects: love, death and language.

“It wasn’t trying to be obscure,” she says, “I wanted it to be experiential.” The film opens with a dream in which she gives birth to Lolabelle, who has been sewn into her stomach; it ends with her late husband Lou Reed’s tender pop song ‘Turning Time Around‘. “I put that song at the end because it goes, ”Turning time around / That’s what love is”, but what does that mean? It’s not about nostalgia. It’s just going, the present, right now, that’s all we have.”

Many anticipated Heart of a Dog would explicitly pay tribute to Reed, who died of liver disease in 2011. “Here in Italy, someone incorrectly thought the film was about him. But it’s not the story of Lou, which is another amazing story.” For the most part, Reed remains off-screen. He appears only towards the end of the film sitting on a beach with Lolabelle, and in a disguised cameo playing a doctor in a re-creation of Anderson’s childhood memory. Despite this, his death haunts the entire project, loading it with pathos.

“The spirit of Lou is very much in the film,” Anderson says, choosing her words carefully. “I wanted to make something that had some of his fierceness in it … I inherited his weapons collection, giant tai chi swords and spears, things like this. They’re quite heavy. I’ve been working on getting strong enough to lift them up. This [film] was a way to make something that was inspired by his force.”

Lolabelle Goes Blind and Plays the Piano

Heart of a Dog is teeming with ghosts. While Reed lingers out of sight, his and Anderson’s rat terrier Lolabelle, who also passed in 2011, takes centre stage. A life-long companion and muse for Anderson, Lolabelle hung out in recording studios, appeared in interviews, and inspired live stories and performances like the aforementioned Music For Dogs. Anderson’s affection for the dog floods the film; the first words we hear are, “Hello little bonehead, I’ll love you forever.”

http://junkee.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/anderson.jpg
Lolabelle and Anderson, performing at a public benefit.

In the film, Lolabelle becomes an avatar for Anderson to speak about the experience of death. Through Lolabelle’s eyes, we tour their neighbourhood in downtown Manhattan with a GoPro strapped to her head, and share the pair’s long walks in the Californian hills. When a hawk swoops upon Lolabelle, mistaking her for a large rabbit, it allows Anderson to explore the awareness of mortality from the perspective of her beloved pooch and to draw parallels with the gaze of New Yorkers post-9/11, as the sky and skyline remains forever transformed from an image of freedom into one of fear.

In this manner, the film makes surprising and darkly comic twists, effortlessly recasting the ordinary as the profound. We learn that in her mature age, Lolabelle went blind and learnt to paw-paint, sculpt, and to play piano. One of the film’s most oddly moving scenes is of Lolabelle’s paws banging against the keys as she barks, rhythmically. Later, Lolabelle passes away and Anderson creates a series of charcoal drawings to chart her 49-day journey through the Bardo, the limbo-like space outlined in The Tibetan Book of the Dead where the mind dissolves before being re-born.

When the European TV Network Arte first invited Anderson to make a film on her “philosophy of life”, she replied, “Uh, I don’t think I have one.” In its place, Heart of a Dog considers an array of influential artists and thinkers, including Mingyur Rinpoche: Anderson and Reed’s Buddhist teacher, “a crazy, wonderful person who disappeared four years ago”. The film quotes his lessons on how to deal with suffering and loss, including not crying while you grieve.

“In the middle of the movie is one of my favourite of his teachings: you have to practice how to feel sad without being sad. This is quite a difficult thing to do and I can’t say I’ve always succeeded, but the idea is there are a lot of sad things in the world – genuinely sad, and genuine suffering. However, if you push them away, they will come and bite you, big time. So if you can, look at that and do something, but don’t become it. Because it’s a short life.

“Part of his teaching is also that we’re here to have a very, very, very good time. The best time you can imagine having. And not to suffer, not to push it away, but also not to become pulled down by it.”
Her Mother Sees The Animals On The Ceiling

Nourished by such ideas, the film is distinctly a product of Anderson’s imaginative, idiosyncratic take on the world. Credited as writer, director, producer and cinematographer, she also narrates and scores the film, and contributed drawings and animations. These are overlaid with iPhone videos and almost-destroyed Super 8 films that her brother fortuitously asked her to digitally transfer. “I found all these pictures of our childhood, skating next to the lake,” she says. “It was this magic world, a very fuzzy world of destroyed film.”

Guided by the film’s working title – “Every love story is a ghost story”, a line from the writer David Foster Wallace – Heart of a Dog wanders a number of memorial spaces, including Lolabelle’s final days at home, and the speech Anderson’s mother made on her deathbed. “She’s speaking to her eight children who have come around her to say goodbye. She was a very formal person, very proud, and so she’s dying and it’s like she’s stepping up to a microphone: ‘Thank you… all… for coming to this… evening.’ She’s trying to thank everybody for such a wonderful experience, but then she’s distracted because she sees animals on the ceiling, all these hallucinatory things. And then she’s back to the microphone, ‘Thank you…’, again. We watched this incredible scene of language just shredding, turning into little pieces, as her mind is shutting down.”

Anderson resists interpretation, arguing the film’s not really “about” Lolabelle, or Lou Reed, or Wittgenstein, or even herself. “I tried to approach this film more like a haiku. To say one thing and to keep it an intense thing without making it mean something. To make it so real and so emotional … It just goes right to your heart.”

–

Heart of a Dog will premiere in Australia at the Adelaide Film Festival in late October, and debuts on HBO Documentary Films in 2016.

–

Annabel Brady-Brown is a founding editor of Fireflies, a film magazine, and an online editor for The Lifted Brow.



Anderson is coming to S.F. soon for this. In all my years of working with Reed, we never crossed paths. I was a huge fan of hers prior to meeting Reed. I think I still have United States on vinyl in storage. I'm debating about reaching out to her, but my November schedule is extremely tight. We'll see...

[GeneChing]

See the post above (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?43523-The-Lou-Reed-issue-May-June-2003&p=719058#post719058). I was a huge fan of Rob's from his work with RatDog.


Famed Bassist Rob Wasserman 1952 – 2016 (http://www.jambase.com/article/famed-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016)
Jun 29, 20163:35 pm PDT By Scott Bernstein

Just hours after Bob Weir shared the news bassist Rob Wasserman was battling serious health issues, comes word Wasserman has died. RatDog guitarist Mark Karan first revealed Rob had passed on with Weir confirming the news shortly thereafter.

Rob Wasserman is best known for his long tenure alongside Weir as a founding member of RatDog as well as the pair’s Bob Weir & Rob Wasserman project. Wasserman was a member of RatDog from the group’s mid ’90s formation through 2002 and then again from 2010 to their most recent performances. He also collaborated with a wide range of legendary musicians including David Grisman, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones, Metallica and Elvis Costello.


Bob Weir (https://twitter.com/BobWeir/status/748281734878355461) ✔@BobWeir
One of the world's most beautiful friends and artists has left us. May Rob's warmth and music live in your hearts as it always has in mine.
3:27 PM - 29 Jun 2016
78 78 Retweets 156 156 likes


The bassist put out a trilogy of inventive albums starting with Solo in 1983 which he followed up with two-musician collaborations on 1988’s Duets and 1994’s Trios. Our thoughts are with Rob’s friends and family. As for now there is no word on the cause of death.

Watch Rob & Bob perform “Victim Or The Crime” in 1989:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTBcXDBKuBA

[GeneChing]

I was sent this by our very own hskwarrior. Major kudos for the find and forward!

https://scontent.fsnc1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t34.0-12/27718118_10155623172752732_981924290_n.png?oh=aac5 79dfb5421ca03a07ba957ebccbe4&oe=5A7B52EA

It's poached from the MJ03 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=318) cover.

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/images/mzine/2003_3.jpg

You'll find it on www.comedytrafficschool.com (https://www.comedytrafficschool.com/), in the video "MEET CAPTAIN TRAFFIC" (appears around the 30 sec mark).