Literary interlude

“Hey, Lou, you got any­thing to drink?”

“No…You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by tak­ing the crap off the mar­ket. Plus you’re poor. [I told you he’d stop at noth­ing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenu­ous hold on hero­dom. And I don’t mean hero­ism.] And even if you wer­en’t poor you would­n’t know what you were buy­ing any­way. You would­n’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your meta­bol­ism, you don’t know your sleep­ing quo­tient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…”

“The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quot­ing an old Ralph J. Gleason column for some reas­on. I was get­ting a little dazed.

“No, it has to do with elec­tri­city and the cell structure…”

—Lester Bangs, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” Creem, March 1975