"This is me in my Halloween costume."
Oh, how tired I am of my
craven old brutish land,
and how I’d like to get away from it
to the north,
where they say people are clean
and noble, learned, rich, free
wide-awake and happy.
Then, in the congregation, the brothers would say
disapprovingly: “Like a bird who leaves the nest
is that man who forsakes his place,”
while I, now far away, would laugh
at the law and ancient wisdom
of this, my arid village.
But I must never follow my dream
and I’ll stay here till I die.
For I’m craven and brutish too.
And what’s more I love, with a
desperate grief,
this my poor,
dirty, sad, unlucky homeland.
It was August, summer of 82.
You had a rusty old car
And me
- I had nothing better to do.
We were goin' in circles.
And me
- I was just hanging on.
You did all the talking.
And me
- I didn't make a sound.
Weasel keeps hangin' onTogether forever
And me?
- I'm goin' in circles.
I've floated on an icecap with a white polar bear
I've floated up and down the golden stairs
I've seen whales and caught in sails all twiskeetwee
But me?
I don't say much.
It's your turn to walk along the runway road.
And me?
I sent my better self on ahead.
Some people know exactly where they're going
The pilgrims to Mecca
The climbers to the mountain top
But me,
I'm looking for just a single momentSo I can slip through time
"Laurie Anderson created a category for herself, a category that could be defined as a state of permanent mutation."
"I think the thing I love best about science is that it's always wrong... it's always changing."
"I'm somebody who believes - not knows, believes - that we're not even here. None of us are even in this room. Much of what we experience is a deep, deep illusion. I trust that more than anything, I have to say."
"The very key to [Eu em Tu / I in U] is a little book which is a book in code. I used to - and still do - write down a lot of dreams because I find that it's an interesting way to know this certain insane part of yourself, [where] you have the privilege of being quite crazy.
I write them down and I thought, well, I wonder really if there is a code to understand [the dreams]. So I put them in a code. I used a code that's similar to codes that were used in World War Two, encryption, and the way encryption was done was with poems.
The message is in a kind of poetry. I feel that language itself is a kind of coding system. It is very hard to really say what you actually mean - you have to go through so many formalities to try to get to [what you mean to say].
The line of poetry I used to encrypt these dreams was one of my favourite poems, a line from George Herbert, who is a 17th century English metaphysical love-poet. He wrote a poem to music: "Now I in you / without a body move". And it was just the way music comes into your body and moves around - but not in a tangible way. In a very physical way, but not a tangible way.
I love this poem because it's how I feel about images and music and words - that they have ways that they can invade you that you can't quite describe so well. But it's the physicality of it that I like as an artist."
So she said to me, "I want you to listen to the music." She put me in front of these big windows overlooking the Hudson River, and she said, "I want you to think about clouds."
