"The lunch talk with Laurie was really fun, I'm glad I went! She was talking about Fenway Bergamot, the advantages of having an alter-ego, about her little clone, the first time she used the voice of authority (the Nova Convention, William Burroughs' festival - when people were expecting Keith Richards to the stage but he didn't come so she (Laurie) had to announce other performers whom the audience didn't want to hear)... and she had this advice for beginner artists that one doesn't have to stick to a single artistic field (music/painting/etc), it's useful to say "multimedia" instead, and not having strict shape of planning at the start of one's career, so you can go into any direction from there... Western beauty = symmetry, Eastern beauty = opposites and contrasts... personality design problems... taboos... being grateful at 62 and still doing what she does... and that she counted that she had 20 years of sleeping in her lifetime so far... the use of dreams... sudden infant death syndrome (when little babies dream about being back in the mother's womb where they hadn't had to respire and they stop to breathe and they die)... the 10,000-year-long timeline plan at NASA, regarding the greening of Mars... her being an artist-in-residence at NASA... watching the Martian landing... Japanese gardens where she wanted to implement tapes of the Martian landing among the sights of the garden... and yes, about the moment when John Kerry lost the election against Bush (when they were asked a simple question: "do you love your wife?" - and Kerry didn't say what people wanted to hear)...
And there was this bunch of people around me who understood every word that Laurie was saying and had a great time listening to her - that's a unique experience for me"
(Mnemosyne's letter to a friend after going to Laurie Anderson's Lunch Talk
in Uppsala, Sweden, April 2010)
By clicking to the pictures below, you can watch the Lunch Talk with Laurie Anderson in Uppsala, April 2010, recorded by a webcam (hence the low quality), cut into two parts.
Part one (video length: 45 mins):
Part two (video length: 12 mins 47 secs):
