[Prestidigitweeze]

Because some of my friends' lives were interwoven with Lou Reed's, I feel his loss not in my own but theirs. He was not an interest so much as a sympathetic figure. I appreciated his decision to write songs about people who didn't seem to matter to anyone else, and I liked hearing friends' stories about going to his house and finding ordinary poor and working class people in his company -- bus drivers and bag ladies who told him about their day and knew their way to his fridge. Nelson Algren would have approved.