Today you can drop the needle on [Lou Reed’s album] Transformer or press play on whatever format you want, and it’s all still there, exactly the way it was in 1972. The song “Perfect Day” starts by listing the simple delights you might enjoy with a lover—drinking sangria in the park, seeing a movie, going home together—an icy song of smoldering feeling. Reed’s voice is close to the mic, low and flat and spoken conspiratorially right into your ear above the simple piano and restrained drums, until Mick Ronson’s strings swell with the chorus; the voice opens up, expands, and echoes as though into a landscape: “Oh it’s such a perfect day/I’m glad I spent it with you.” Crushing, that feeling, so beautiful it’s sad because life is fleeting and emotions are fickle and people are more complex than is good for us—and you know exactly what he means; it is mapped onto your own experience, in your heart. “Perfect Day” ends repeating what could be a threat or a promise: “You’re going to reap just what you sow. You’re going to reap just what you sow.” It’s haunting, and it might as well be a statement about the operations of criticism, or our relationships with works of art, or pop culture, or life itself—you’re going to reap just what you sow.

—from the end of my essay “Pop & Pleasure & Freedom” on Jon Savage’s criticism and pop/punk music criticism in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

Thank you to everyone who made it out to David Zwirner last night for my conversation about color theory with Lisa Yusakvage (Itten! Albers! and Laura Ashley!—Oh my!) on the occasion of her incredible new show (on view until June 26th). Not coincidentally, for the new episode of “Private Life” Yuskavage reads Ingrid D. Rowland’s essay “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” published in the May 27 2020 issue of the New York Review.

I hope you enjoy it!

Angelic Transmissions

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