Sunday, June 2, 2013

THE FOOD OF LOVE (REVISITED)




When I was in New York I met Duncan Hannah at a dinner.  That’s him above on the right. He’s a terrific painter, who appears all over the place in Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, an oral history of New York punk.  Apparently he once had an encounter with Lou Reed.


Duncan Hannah: “So I’m thinking, Hey, I know about this, and I’m sitting with my hero, Lou Reed, and we’re going to have an intellectual conversation about Raymond Chandler. Alright! …
“And he said, ‘Well, look, why don’t you come back to my hotel with me?’ I said, ‘And?’ He said, ‘And you can shit in my mouth. How’d you like that?’ I said, ‘I don’t think I would like that.’
“I was really ashen. And Lou started whispering, like it was supposed to make me hot, and said, ‘Does that, does that repulse you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll put a — I’ll put a plate over my face, then you can shit on the plate. How’d you like that?’
“I said, ‘No, I don’t think I’d like that, either.’”


Duncan is man of quality and distinction, obviously.  And you know, coprophagia doesn’t hold many attractions for me, so I wasn’t going to report this, but now we hear that Lou Reed has had a liver transplant, which no doubt has a great deal to do with the intake of drink and drugs but might just conceivably have something to do with consuming feces.

The operation was done in Cleveland rather than New York because, according to Laurie Anderson, Lou’s other half, the hospitals in New York are “dysfunctional.”  Yeah right, Laurie, it’s the hospitals that are dysfunctional, not our own dear Lou.


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