Lou Reed’s dirty boulevard of dreams
THIS ISSUE: Kurt Gottschalk is not a young man anymore.
New York City is a dream you can’t have—glitz, glamor, grime, too much to take in from within, too much to understand from afar. It’s a metropolitan manifestation of the Heisenberg principle, its nature changing with how you look at it. No matter how you try, you can’t see the forest for the skyscrapers.
Seen from the distance of my Illinois adolescence, New York was Woody Allen movies and reruns, intellectuals and petty criminals, the intoxicating and the incomprehensible. rock’n’roll city, home of Kiss (my first love), then the Ramones, then later (for me) the Velvet Underground. Once I’d been funneled through the vortex of college and Chicago and spat out the other end, it became my home.
