Velvets

At the New Yorker, Alex Abramovich on the culture clash between Warholites and VU:

“We spoke two completely different languages,” Mary Woronov, who’d been a dancer with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, said. “We were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were so slow to speak with these wide-open eyes—‘Oh, wow!’—so into their ‘vibrations’; we spoke in rapid machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into ‘free’ and the American Indian and ‘going back to the land’ and trying to be some kind of ‘true, authentic’ person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women, they were these big round-titted girls, you would say hello to them and they would just flop down on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, S & M, not fucking. They were barefoot; we had platform boots. They were eating bread they had baked themselves—and we never ate at all!”

Here's Douglas Wolk on the reissue of the Matrix tapes and Dean Wareham ditto - might have to acquire this set....

(One of my cats has been having dental woes - he had to go in Monday to have seven [!] teeth extracted - but when the vet was here last week to do the preliminary check-up, we had a funny conversation about Lou Reed. Dr. P. spotted the name on the spine of a book on my shelf, and told me the tale of how he bid through some kind of charity auction for the leather jacket Clinton gave to LR when he played at the inauguration - and then got it signed by Lou himself....)