When the Musician Meets the Explorer

"For me, art is about being able to see something or hear something in a really concentrated, focused way. It's not the stuff you put into museums. [...] To me, art is about being able to pay attention to the ocean sound that we live in, to start with, and the incredible things that we're seeing. And artists draw your attention to those things."

(Laurie Anderson at the Explorers Club in NYC, April 2011)

The Explorers Club uploaded their video of 'Music & Exploration – The Avant-garde Meets Exploration', a conversation between Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg, recorded on April 25th, 2011:

The topics of the discussion were (amongst others): why animals sing, Laurie's concert for dogs in Sydney, researching dolphins' "talk", Lolabelle's illness and music therapy (alas, she has recently passed away :( ), the Estuarium ("it's great taking a dog to a fish museum" - L. A.), Laurie's rage against mp3 ("a horrible solution [for compressing audio data], crushing music to nothing"), a moving story about parrots' musical memory in a Vietnamese village; regret, image interpretation and self-expression - and many more.

"Deals with the Spiritual Issues..." - the Transcript

Here's the transcript of 'Refiguring the Spiritual', a conversation between Laurie Anderson and the public on the 10th of February, 2011 at Columbia University. (I have already linked the audio recording of the conversation on this blog.)

Detroit vs. Laurie

Reviews of Laurie Anderson's recent lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts - one from each side:

• The Detroiter: Who Are You People? - a lengthy description provided by Geoffrey LaRue at Crasstalk

• Laurie Anderson Lecture at DFT: Had I paid for tickets, I woulda been pissed! - LAWRENCEcreative was not blown away by what he witnessed, to say the least. Oh well.

"Deals with the Spiritual Issues of Our Time"

"I don't actually believe in angels but I do believe that we are them."

(Laurie Anderson at Columbia University, 2011)

Listen to how Laurie Anderson navigated her way through the sometimes elusive / dim / intangible subjects of spirituality, faith and religion in a public conversation held at Columbia University on February 10, 2011 - thanks to the CU Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life website, the conversation can be downloaded as a podcast:

• 'Refiguring the Spiritual' with Laurie Anderson (audio length: 61 mins 35 secs, file size: 28.1 MB)

It's almost impossible (and unnecessary) to list all the topics touched upon - just to name a few: Melville and the Biblical symbolism of Moby Dick; silence, pain and meditation; being a spy as an artist, Laurie's pentecostal missionary grandmother, Capitalist Realism, making freeform fiction out of Egyptian architecture; John Cage, NASA's poetic projects, pressure of technology; pitch and prayer; How to Be Idle, the School of Life, what is an artist, etc. etc. etc.

You can find a bunch of great reviews of the conversation on ircpl.org by Elizabeth Kipp-Giusti, Courtney Bender, Shelly Silver, María Cristina Fernández Hall, Kali Handelman and Nora Griffin.

Twitter's archive has also got a series of enthusiastic tweets from the event by keith_wilson and saletteg. :)



(FYI: all URLs open in a new window)

Now This Is What I Call Blind Luck.

Laurie Anderson at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland,

November 2010
photo source: ASP Katowice

(Hint: click to the picture for more photos.)

UPDATE: it's so digital... on-again, off-again

Endless, Colourful, Oppressive Dreams

Watch the third video from Estoril (this one's got a really great quality); Laurie Anderson talking about 21 years of sleeping, dreaming, Carl Jung, the power of words and the making process of the drawing dream diary 'Night Life'.

Vapor. Lawyers. Calcium. Imbrication.

No idea what the heck those words in the title mean? They are part of a list of words that have never been used in a song lyrics so far. In that way, they are also part of Laurie Anderson's Music Therapy in which the therapee's task is to write lyrics using solely words that have never been used in a pop song lyrics before.

"I think failure is probably the thing that's taught me the most about what I want to do, so I really value the moments when things really completely fall apart."

(Laurie Anderson, 2005)

The citations above are from Youtube's latest video of Laurie Anderson (a truly epic one!) - a lecture she did as an artist-in-residence at the New School in New York City, 2005, originally aired as a webcast (hence the fragmented video stream). The lecture touched on subjects like the idea of space, using the right tools; rectangles, mental hospitals, different kinds of therapies for people who have been using too much technology, taboos like sleeping in public; night courts and the 'Institutional Dreams' series, the 'Life' project (where the live webcast image of a prisoner was projected into an art museum), the fake hologram and different points of view, Alexander the Great, turning points in Laurie Anderson's career, pieces of advice for beginner artists, separating art and politics, form and content; voyeurism, hiding in the spotlight on the stage, using the wrong sense, being an artist-in-residence at NASA, and so on.

(FYI: Contrary to the description of the video, it does not contain the screening of 'Hidden Inside Mountains', Laurie's HD movie made for the Japan EXPO.)

Videos from Estoril

(At least try to) watch Laurie Anderson reading an excerpt from Don Delillo's "Point Omega" in Estoril, November 2010:

Part II is a video of questions and answers:

The videos were posted by the blogger of A montanha mágica - by clicking to the url you can find another photo of the reading there.

Deep, Deep, Deep Illusion

"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."

(Laurie Anderson in São Paolo, Brasil, October 2010)

A Book in Code

"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."

(Laurie Anderson in São Paolo, Brasil, October 2010)

Lunch Talk with Laurie Anderson in Uppsala

"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):

Reason #157 Why Laurie Anderson Rocks: Personal Service Announcement Videos

"I made PSA videos in place of a music video. I had finished an album and the record company goes "okay, time to do a music video" and, you know, it's so humiliating, you have to look really good and prance around and lip-synch... it looks so bad and they're so corny. I mean, now there's been some nice music videos but very few of them. It's kinda great to make a tiny visual poem that's based on music. In my opinion, the inventor of this art form is Wim Wenders, because he made the first movies for pieces of music - it's just that song, that short piece of music - and he made a visual thing to it... and then, of course, it became a promo thing for record companies.

Anyway, they asked me to do this music video... and I realized that actually if you're really positive about something, and secure, they'll kinda go along with it. I said "instead of exactly relating to the music, I'm going to make what I call Personal Service Announcements, things that are related to the songs. That's cool, you know."

In the end they had nothing to do with the songs: they were about how much money women make, different things about the national debt... They really hadn't anything to do with them. And none of the music was in it from the record.

However, I was very definite about it, I told them "that will buy great, don't you think?!" People at the record companies don't know what to think... They are super insecure. I think that's why so many people have breakdowns in Hollywood because it's such a woodoo industry... It's different from other things because you don't know why a record or a movie is successful, how much does it have to do with what it is. It's just a craps, you don't really know."

(Laurie Anderson at the Kelly Writers House, 24th of March, 2004,
as loosely captioned from the video of the reading *)

(* the video, in spite of its poor quality, is even more hilarious than this transcript)

Who Wrote These Rules?

One night I had a dream
and it was a typical dream:
suddenly your long-dead grandmother walks in the door,
and next you fall off a cliff, and that kind of things -
a whole series of interlocking plots
and themes,
kind-of carelessly jump-cut together.

In most dreams,
I'm a somewhat naive dolt
kind-of wandering in and out of the subplots,
not really understanding them,
but
in this dream
I suddenly looked down
and just for an instant
I saw myself,
way below,
sitting at a desk,
writing the dream,
and making up these complex plots for this dolt-like dreamer to
wander through.

Intellectually, I believe in Jung's theory of the self
as a three-storey construction
but I had never seen it physically,
almost architecturally in action.

It was like a relationship
of director to star,
but it was also like
what happens to everybody
when they invent a credible and
more or less consistent personality,
and then they just sort-of live it out.

And it's only when you do something that's
really out-of-character:
Impulsively jumping into a fountain
on your way to work,
Or have a sudden barking fit
while you're waiting for the bus,
That you realize
how tightly scripted
your plan really is.

And you start to ask:
Who wrote this anyway?
Who wrote these rules?

(as heard on Talk Normal: A Lecture by Laurie Anderson, recorded for the 1987 Tokyo International Video Biennale)

Laurie's Brainwave

Janna Levin, astrophysicist and writer. Laurie Anderson, multimedia artist and amateur anthropologist. A free-form public conversation between these two women with BRAINZ, recorded at the Rubin Museum of Art in 2010, as part of the 'Brainwave' series. What a treat.

(More photos by Michael Palma)

Janna Levin is the author of 'How the Universe Got Its Spots', a book on spacetime, the universe and quantum theory. Laurie Anderson is NASA's first (and last) artist-in-residence.

Thanks to the magnificence of the world wide web, we (i. e. distant inferior forms of life) have access to this intriguing and hilarious exchange of thoughts-- in both audio and visual format. Hallelujah.