“I actually feel pretty comfortable in New York. I get scared, like, in Sweden,” mumbled Lou Reed, the legendary frontman of the Velvet Underground, while playing the disheveled city-dweller in the 1995 movie “Blue in the Face.” “It’s kind of empty, they’re all drunk, everything works. If you stop at a traffic light and don’t turn your engine off, people come over and talk to you about it. You go to the medicine cabinet and open it up, and there will be a little poster saying: ‘In case of suicide, call …’ You turn on the TV, there’s an ear operation. These things scare me. New York? No.”