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
141—Pati Jinich's Mexican Jewish Table
140 -The Climate Underground with Al Gore and Alice Waters
139 - Waiting for Joe DiMaggio
138 - The Keepers - Archive Fever, with host Frances McDormand
137- The Keepers - Archiving the Underground, with Host Frances McDormand
136 - The Lou Reed Archive with Laurie Anderson
135 - Deep Fried Fuel - A Biodiesel Kitchen Vision - Celebrating Over the Road
133 - WHER - 1000 Beautiful Watts, The First All-Girl Radio Station in the Nation
133 - Theaster Gates — Keeping the South Side
132 - The Pancake Years
131 - Night of the Living Intern: First Stories from Kitchen Sisters Interns
130 - Lipstick Traces — Dreaming in Public
129 - Martin Scorsese — Try Anything
128 - First Day of School—1960, New Orleans
127 - Robert Krulwich—Talking Story, The First Third Coast
126 - Lawrence Weschler—Archivist of the Odd, the Marvelous, the Passionate and Slightly Askew
125 - The Passion of Chris Strachwitz—Arhoolie Records
124 - The Brothers Burns — A Conversation with Filmmakers Ken & Ric Burns
123- San Francisco—Stories from the Model City, Part Three
122 - Burning Man — Archiving the Ephemeral
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