Sunday Morning

January 10, 2008 at 12:39 pm · Filed under life, movies, music and tagged: andy warhol, franny & zooey, gordon matta clark, lou reed, nico, nyc, royal tenenbaums, salinger, velvet underground, wes anderson

As I was walking through Ibn Gvirol the other day, something amazing happened. I heard it. I’m not much of a believer, but when I heard it, I believed it. “Watch out, the worlds behind you”, is what he said, and I knew he was right. I understood what life is all about.

It’s not so common to be walking and have The Velvet Underground as your personal soundtrack, coming from a falafel store, from some pizza place, from some radio of a worker who’s tired of digging holes for you to drive smoothly and feel like you’re flying. I felt as if I was trapped in a Wes Anderson movie, and I was walking in slow motion, being watched by someone who was listening to Sunday Morning inside his head.

Having Lou Reed speaking to you is the best sign that you can ever get. Even when you’re not in some NYC bar in the 60’s, even when you fell in love with Basquiat and hated Andy Warhol like a jealous wife, even when you weren’t there to see the street art of Gordon Matta-Clark and the beatniks, hippies, communists, and cursed rock & roll poets who left their traces from coast to coast.

So when some days ago, he spoke to me, I knew it meant something. And I pictured Gwyneth Paltrow, with her fur coat, thinking about how she has been out walking, thinking about the things she forgot to do. And I pictured Franny Glass in her Upper West Side apartment, reading “The way of a Pilgrim” and repeating things in her mind as if they were mantras. And I pictured myself, walking through Ibn Gvirol in slow motion, thinking of all the streets I had crossed not so long ago.

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