New book about his love for Tai Chi and music will be published in March

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Lou Reed attends a tai chi session with his own teacher, Ren Guan Yi, at the Sydney Opera House, 2010.

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Lou Reed attends a tai chi session with his own teacher, Ren Guan Yi, at the Sydney Opera House, 2010.

Photo: Getty Images, Mark Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

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A new book about Lou Reed’s lifelong passion, The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, will be released on March 14, 2023. The work is intended to combine writings about and by Lou Reed about music, meditation and martial arts. Reed was an accomplished Tai Chi practitioner from the 1980s until his death in 2013. The book is 320 pages, containing 165 photos. It is edited by HarperOne and his widow Laurie Anderson.

Tai Chi Talks with Iggy Pop and Tony Visconti

The book includes “unpublished writings on the technique, practice, and purpose of the martial arts, as well as essays, observations, and riffs on meditation and life,” according to the editors. Throughout his life, Reed discussed the practice with artists, friends, and other tai chi practitioners such as Iggy Pop, Tony Visconti, Julian Schnabel, and the late Hal Willner. These conversations also appear in “The Art of the Straight Line“. The artist himself was taught by Master Ren GuangYi.

Personal foreword by Reed’s wife

There will also be a foreword by Laurie Anderson. She co-edited the book with Stephan Berwick, Bob Currie, and Scott Richman.

Lou Reed died doing tai chi

Rock pioneer Lou Reed died practicing Tai Chi in October 2013 at the age of 71, according to his wife. He suffered from chronic liver disease for years, which eventually led to organ failure.

“He died while looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 ways of tai chi with his musician’s hands moving in the air,” Anderson wrote in her obituary of her husband at the time.

Reed, who became world famous as a co-founder of The Velvet Underground and with solo songs like “Walk On The Wild Side,” was “a prince and a fighter,” Anderson wrote. “I know that his songs, which are about the pain and the beauty of the world, will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt in life.”

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