Reed was creating a listening room for something beyond despair. Using Berlin the city as a metaphor, he performed an aural novella driven by the German philosophy of the pre-war period as spread to the undergraduates of the 1950s and beyond by Jean-Paul Sartre. When the German troops marched out of Paris, the German philosophers of being -- Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger -- marched in. Reed's disaffected hero moved beyond attachment to anything, beyond being into nothingness. This is the void where you were asked, "How do you think it feels to always make love by proxy?"

¶ 7:50 PM