Picture Cycle

I. Different But Same: An Introduction to the Introduction

I recently went on a Lou Reed kick, listening to his solo albums again because they’re less familiar to me than the Velvet Underground albums I listened to in high school, and also more interesting. “Women” and “Street Hassle” are two of my favorite Lou Reed songs. “Women” is Lou being romantic and drolly whimsical. “Street Hassle” is Lou being Warholian (his mentor) and McLarenian: “And sometimes, man, they just don’t act rational/They think they’re just on TV.” Unlike Warhol, who loved TV and celebrity, young Lou hated the press, and gave unfriendly clipped interviews in sunglasses. This surliness could have been an act, sure, but it wasn’t entirely a Warholian one. Warhol was shy with the press because he was shy, not contemptuous. Listening to Lou, brought me back to Lou and Laurie, my first love. I listened to Laurie on my Walkman growing up, in the back of my parents’ car, and while riding on my 10-speed bike in Provincetown. A strange musical passion for a ten year old. Lou and Laurie were in love in the way that my parents are in love. They found each other late in life, at a concert in Munich in 1992. My parents, also collaborators, found each other early in life, in Moscow. Through my internet searches this October, I arrived at an YouTube interview Lou and Laurie did in 2003 with the now-disgraced Charlie Rose. The interview was twelve years into their relationship. Nine years later, Lou would die. Lou talked about Warhol’s influence on him—the way Warhol was a constant voice in his singer’s ear; the voice in his voice. How he always heard it and listened to it even after Warhol had been gone for years. At one point in the interview, Laurie adds that she was also a “Warhol baby,” not part of the factory like Lou, but Warhol’s voice, she says, was in her ear too. Then she imitated the voice, which was also a phrase and a mantra: “Thaaat’s grrrrreeeeaaat.” “Warhol would tell everyone this. No matter what it was.” This is what the writer Kevin Killian, a descendant of that affirmative Warholian pronouncement, was like too. He was always pro. Pro everything. Pro everyone. A fan.

Temperamentally, Kevin was Warhol and I am Lou. If I could give terse TV interviews like young Lou (or young Susan Sontag, also from the Warhol milieu. It is maybe a writer’s dream to withhold words), I would. But art culture is different now—alarmingly fame-centered—and only late 20^th century rock stars could reject their fans and still be adored. Despite our vastly different approaches to reading contemporary...