omigodmigodmigod. I'm in the library and after 10 minutes I get bored out of my mind and look around and there's the Faber Book of Pop (eds. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage) on the table and I leaf through it and the introduction says Lou Reed did an interview with Vaclav Havel and it's in the book and it's *amazing*. Havel is amazing. He said that there was a band -- oh no I can't remember the name, the Universal Band of Plastic People or some other configuration of those words, now called Midnight Unots (eh?) -- and they played some Velvet Underground songs -- Havel brought the first Velvet Underground LP to Prague from New York! he was there in Columbia University for the riots, gave talks with Milos Forman, went shopping in East Village and bought psychedelic posters, how cool is that? -- and the band was of course arrested and Havel and some people organized a campaign to help them and Havel persuaded all these intellectual professor types to help too and that was while people could still all go to a courtroom without fear and they didn't get the band off entirely but the band members got lighter sentences than they would otherwise have had -- and that created a community of solidarity that they thought it would be a shame not to continue -- and that was how Charter 77 started. That's amazing. And later Lou Reed plays for Havel and his friends -- Reed says he doesn't want to do a huge concert cos he's here as a journalist and he's a very private person and Havel says nono, just friends, but that means almost 200 of them, all dissidents -- and some of them know the Velvet Underground songs by heart so Reed plays with them -- he (Reed) says he meant his music to be more than just music, to be about the freedom of expression as well, and that there in Czechoslovakia (the interview was in 1988) his music had found a home -- and after, Havel gives Reed a little black book of his lyrics translated into Czech and says that there are only 200 of those books; they were printed secretly (in the Communist times) and anyone having them then would have been arrested.