Your hero just went to the bathroom...

Something I can't quite get over...Lou Reed played us on his radio show.



Completely unreal. I am humbled, and genuflecting, in the crumbling marble halls of the Rock Gods. Which brings me to something I've been thinking about lately. They say its never a good idea to meet your heroes (I have a few examples to attest to this...namely R. Hell...of whom I still greatly admire, but to wit a tinge of nausea is aroused when recalling our interview, my accidental misquoting, and a subsequent petulant reprimand). Never meet your heroes... Something I'm a firm believer in, with one caveat: if your hero considers you an admirable artist in your own right (one saving grace of my experience with Hell is that he said my writing had "a lot of juice"). Not that I'm saying Lou Reed considers us good artists (apparently we made the cut for his show...but...), or that I would ever feel comfortable meeting the man to whom I admire so greatly for his songwriting abilities and lyrical street renderings (I hear he can be a bit hot and cold). But in my experience, its always a much more fruitful experience to do your own work, then let it stand on its own, and have whatever admirers come to you. This happened very recently with another artist I greatly admire, and the results were wholly positive, with one other caveat: after meeting him and hanging out, I realized there was a disconnect between the person and the artist. Something like eating a delicious hamburger and later on seeing how the hamburger was made. Maybe that's not the best analogy. But you get the point.

You could look at it this way. If you're an artist of any stripe, consider your own work, and how it came to be. Think about the supernatural process in which your art was boundlessly extracted from the ether. Perhaps you're a writer. Where exactly did that best line come from? When you look back on it, is it you? Part of your being perhaps, but when you're on the toilet, or sucking down whiskey after whiskey at the bar, is that line you? In my case, I would say that the best of the best of what I've done, of my whole oeuvre, is the high watermark of my being. The thing in which I can take the utmost pride (in my case, the one piece of artwork I'm most happy with is a song called 'The Stone Statue I'). But do I achieve that level on a day-to-day basis? And especially within interpersonal relations? The answer would be a resounding 'NO'.

Sometimes I like to think of Baudelaire on the toilet. It makes me consider the consequences of holding someone who I admire in such great esteem. And I think Baudelaire would like it that way. Because when you consider such greatness in such debased terms, you can equate yourself to those terms. And therefore you can go on being great. On the toilet, or not.