LOU REED’S NEPHEW (2)

By: Jim Hanas
February 4, 2026

We are delighted to present LOU REED’S NEPHEW, a 10-part series featuring collages created by HILOBROW friend Jim Hanas as illustrations for his “wickedly smart, highly entertaining” 2023 email serial of the same title.

The phrase “Lou Reed’s nephew” turned into a series of vignettes about work, art, and tech, which I started posting on Medium in 2012, losing steam after the death of the historical Lou Reed on October 27, 2013. The collages came much later, spontaneously, when I released the long-gestating manuscript to my agent a few years ago. I was sick of words and their intractability. My wife had been cutting things up and pasting them back together as long as I’d known her. I just joined in. “Lou Reed’s nephew” had become such a character in our lives that she made what is arguably our first L.R.N. collage by applying block letters to an early-1960s magazine photo with a recursive caption that simply cannot be improved. It reads: “Visitors to the Parke-Bernet Galleries gape at Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer which later sold for $2,300,000.” A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, guarded by a slouching subject in an ill-fitting uniform.

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LOU REED’S NEPHEW (2)

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