If you've ever wondered if Laurie Anderson is a fan of any mainstream hip hop / pop song, the answer is here for ya; hidden in the following hilarious post-Hanukkah / pre-Christmas chat between Laurie and AndrewAndrew on East Village Radio.
You can listen to the whole conversation in one on EVRadio's website, or in three parts, cut / edited by Mnemosyne:
PART ONE
Part one's topics: colored "photographs" from outer space,
folding chairs and architecture (
São Paulo,
Matthew Barney, male architects and phallic symbols,
Frank Gehry, Manhattan's 1930s quaintness, etc). A super fun part of the chat was the following:
AA: What'd they say about Lincoln Center? They said it was like a gas station, a fancy gas station.
LA: They said it was something that Mussolini ordered over the phone.
AA: [laughter] Oh, that's fantastic. Mussolini ordered over the phone.
LA: Yeah. Gimme, er, something kind-of boxy and white and, I don't know, glitzy, little bit of sparkles...
[...]
AA: It's sort of fascist, when you look at the columns, and the symmetric...
LA: I know, yes, it is.
AA: It's like an Apple store almost.
[...]
LA: You are right that Lincoln Center materials are very Mac-like. They're really smooth and slippery, and kind-of little bit of rounded...
AA: It's seductive... and also stand-offish.
LA: Yeah. Exactly.
AA: There's something in that Mac stores are beautiful, they're simple, and you wanna be a part of this culture but you know you're not a part of that culture.
LA: Right. You're wearing the wrong clothes for that.
AA: Yes. It's aspirational. It's kinda like a night club. Like, "no-no, let me in, I'm cool".
PART TWO
Topics of part two: Laurie's first time of getting a
non-geek Grammy nomination (i. e. not for producing / engineering an album / song), the
chair and the projections in 'Delusion',
Himalayan art at Rubin Museum,
talking about nothing with Charles Seife, multiple universes and the
Quantum Suicide Test, Candide,
the most photographed barn in the world (see
Don Delillo's
'White Noise'), top popes / co-popes / Poperdose / The Sane Pope / "maybe we're all exactly the same pope"... and
'Flow', Laurie's Grammy-nominated violin piece:
AA: We're gonna play 'Flow', it's off of 'Homeland'.
LA: It's on 'Homeland'. Didn't come off of it. It's still on it.
AA: And this is the particular track... although the whole album is quite good.
LA: [in mock relief] Thank you. It's the afterthought track. I wasn't gonna put that on [the album]... It's kind-of... the encore. It's a quizzical thing. It's gonna be in the new Julian Schnabel film a lot. It's called 'Miral'. It's a movie about four generations of female Palestinian terrorists. Really difficult... fantastic. Really brave movie... tough topic.
PART THREE
Topics in part three: 'Ice Ice Baby', the Secret Vatican Disco, beat poets, alternatives to Wal-Mart,
'Capitalist Realism',
'Baader-Meinhof Komplex' and terrorists today,
Bill Ayers...
LA: A lot of underground people and a lot of radicals from the Sixties and Seventies really did have this idea of freedom and of freeing people and making [the world] a better place. This was not Bin Laden who's just a kind of a madman, really, and somebody whose ideal is not freedom. Ours is. I mean, we're from the Western side of the world, we come from the Greeks, they invented a lot of stuff and we thought those were some really great ideals, like, the individual should be free, so this place is built on [those ideals]. But you wouldn't know it now. You wouldn't recognize it now. It's scary.
... plus
Lolabelle's Christmas record, and Laurie's concert for dogs in Sydney. Hint: you can get the record on request via
Dogrelations' contact form!
