The Art of the Straight Line

My Tai Chi

By: Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson

Narrated by: Laurie Anderson, Stephan Berwick, Bob Currie, Scott Richman, Ron Butler, Feodor Chin, Adam Grupper, Jeff Gurner, Hillary Huber, Brian Nishii, Rob Shapiro, Oliver Wyman, Eric Yang, Emily Woo Zeller

The Art of the Straight Line captures the energy of Lou Reed’s worlds of Tai Chi, music, and meditation. It was edited by his wife, the artist Laurie Anderson, with Stephan Berwick, Bob Currie, and Scott Richman.

Lou Reed was a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and founding member of the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground. He collaborated with many artists, from Andy Warhol and John Cale to Robert Wilson and Metallica. Reed had a groundbreaking solo career that spanned five decades until his death in 2013.

Reed was also an accomplished martial artist whose practice began in the 1980s. He studied with Chen Tai Chi pioneer Master Ren GuangYi. This book is a comprehensive collection of Reed’s writings on Tai Chi. It includes conversations with Reed’s fellow musicians, artists, friends, and Tai Chi practitioners, including Julian Schnabel, A. M. Homes, Hal Willner, Mingyur Rinpoche, Eddie Stern, Tony Visconti, and Iggy Pop.

The Art of the Straight Line features Reed’s unpublished writings on the technique, practice, and purpose of martial arts, as well as essays, observations, and riffs on meditation and life.

So inspiring

As a yoga practitioner and huge Lou Reed fan, I really appreciated this book. It is as complex and profound as his music, and a great philosophical introduction to Tai Chi.

Taichi passion

Love the narrative way to express the essence of taichi. It’s a piece full of love.

A nice supplement to the DeCurtis book

If you're a big Lou Reed fan, you've already read the DeCurtis biography. This makes a nice supplement to that if you're at all interested in Tai Chi.

This book is a bit too hagiographical at times, and some of the interviewees go on a bit too long talking about themselves, which is a problem with an audio book because it's harder to find where their part ends so that you can skip ahead. While the actors do a perfectly good job of "playing" various people in Lou's Tai Chi life such as Tony Visconti and Mick Rock when they read those parts of the book, it is a treat to hear Laurie Anderson read her own parts.

The Art of Lou Reed

Not your typical biography, goes through different time periods and different narrators it tells a bit of Lou.
It made me start Tai Chi. It made me smile or sad sometimes.
I don't know if people who are not die hard fans would relate, but there's always time to become one.

A creative approach to tai chi traditional dance humor and otherwise

The discussion of lou reed, most chapters written by a solitary author and edited together over the evolution of the book can be diffused order by diverse author brings together a lou reed that lovers of his music may not know his lyrics are as he insisted not merely an autobiographical shadow of himself His life fluid, identity changing and recast in the perspective of each voice as we listen