During my youth I decided that one day in decrepit middle age I would aim to become one of three people: Mother Teresa, Fyodor Dostoevski or Lou Reed. Then I grew up and got real — the first two were impossibly lofty, but Reed was a goal to strive for. With his public moods that fluctuated between bad and rotten, his seemingly permanent bad hair-and-jeans-days, his weird but fascinating sunglasses that look like Salvation Army discards reworked by West Village artists, that whole Schlitz-drenched, nicotine-stained, f**k-off-I'm-busy-doing-nothing attitude that adorned his whole being like an ancient leather jacket or a dirty diamond ring — how did one get to such a state of chic and was there a road map somewhere?
And then I saw "Lou Reed's Berlin" and finally realized, with the true and accurate perception of an adult, that Lou Reed is totally beyond my aspirations. Sob. It's not just the obvious stuff like he's a living legend, but also the way he holds a guitar (so it looks as though he's gently yanking on someone's hair as she entwines herself around his torso), the terrifically dissipated air that can only be achieved after decades of hard drinking, hard smoking, hard sex with men, women and transvestites, firing Nico from the Velvet Underground, hanging out with David Bowie, et al. Talk about the hopelessly unattainable.
"Lou Reed's Berlin," half straightforward music documentary and half rock 'n' roll trance, is here to say that though the tides will flow, the winds will change and the whole globe may quit smoking, Lou Reed — at 66 — will remain the boozy, tar-infested monster of old Brooklyn cool.