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
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120 - San Francisco—Stories from the Model City, Part One
119 - Nancy Pearl—Librarian Action Figure
118 - The Nation's 10th Keeper—David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
117 - Dieter Kosslick’s Last Red Carpet Ride
116 - The Bob Dylan Archive - A Curveball Comes To Tulsa
115 - You Too Can Barbecue - Stubb's Blues Cookbook Cassette & More
114 - Chamelecon—Below the Border in Honduras with Scott Carrier
113 - Filmmaker Agnés Varda — A Conversation
112 - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Celebrating 100 years
111 - Palaces for the People—Author Eric Klinenberg from The Librarian Is In
110 - Filmmaker Wim Wenders - The Entire Caboodle
109 - Linda Spalding - A Reckoning
108 - The Dark Side of the Dewey Decimal System
107 - William Ferris—Keeper of Southern Folklife
106 - 21 Collections—Every Object has a Story
Bonus Episode - The Free-Range Archivist: Jason Scott
105 - The Keepers: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy
104 - The Keepers: Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen
103 - The Keepers: The Lenny Bruce Collection
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