Duh.

Cooking hot dogs via electrocution?

Er, sounds familiar.

For Japan with Love: the Interview

"Our set was improvised. You never really know what's gonna happen when you improvise. But I felt like there was definitely a spirit there, that kind-of took over. I don't know if it's conscious or choice-- I don't think those are the right words-- but something definitely magical happened."

John Zorn on the trio of himelf, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed
April 2011

In the following video by Japan Society NYC, Lou Reed, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass are discussing their musical selections for the benefit concert for Japan, plus sharing some of their fondest Japan-related memories. Watch and learn about Lou Reed's first computer calculator watch and why Laurie's Japanese s-s-sucks:

The Never-Had Art of Conversation, LOL

"Art and tv don't mix, everybody knows that. If people wanted to see art on tv, they'd say "hey, you know, I want to see art on tv"."

(Tad Eustace Ghostal a. k. a. Space Ghost sharing his doubts about Laurie Anderson's guest appearance on his talk show)

Behold yet another rip-roaring slab of quality talk show entertainment: in an episode of 'Space Ghost Coast to Coast', an animated late night show, Space Ghost had the displeasure to interview downtown musician type Citizen Anderson on subjects like remote controls, online invisibility and Richard Nixon.

To stay diplomatic, the episode was not the highlight of Space Ghost's professional career as a talk show host. But who cares if you can get a screen capture that reveals its message only when flipped horizontally :)

Hablar... Gone... Awry

"I looked out and every single person had gone..."

(Laurie Anderson on her worst concert experience)

... the quote above is taken from Laurie's adventure with Spanish language from the time when she was trying to get rid of one of her bad habits. Read the rest of the story at WorstGig, music journalist Jon Niccum's interview series on artists' worst concert experiences.

Musical Canine Classification

"This summer, a few months ago, I was directing a big music festival in Sydney and I said "okay, we're gonna invite a lot of people, all my favourite musicians from all around the world - Mongolian throat singers, rock bands, symphonies, blues guys" - a crazy mixture. And I said "I wanna do some music for dogs", and they said "okay, fine, fine". We thought maybe couple hundred dogs would show up... thousands of dogs showed up! All on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. [...]

I had the best time of my life. Also the dogs - they had been told for a week "you're going to a show", they were all very excited because they'd been having this preparation from their owners going "it's gonna be music for you and you're gonna love it", so when they got there, their tails were like...

BLAST!!

... You know, a lot of people say their dogs like classical music - for the same reason they say their children do because they [fall] asleep and it's very convenient when they're just...

ZZZZ

... but there were a lot of rocker dogs that went like...

I WANT TO ROCK!!

... Well, a lot of [the music] was frequencies upward, dogs love the high stuff but dog trainers said "don't play the super high stuff because you don't know what's gonna happen with that many dog"... My favourites were the dogs who were in the front row, the droolers, they were just looking up at the stage like...

WHAT.

... they were so sweet! And a lot of people brought their very old dogs... in carriages, dogs with one leg... it was a magic thing for me because I love animals and I love music. What it was it's just a new kind of music and a new kind of event."

[Stills of and quotes from Laurie Anderson, as seen / heard at Garantat 100%]

Laurie at AndrewAndrew Again

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

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part one (audio length: 14 mins 06 secs, file size: 19.4 MB)

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

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part two (audio length: 13 mins 09 secs, file size: 18.1 MB)

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

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part three (audio length: 17 mins 10 secs, file size: 23.6 MB)

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!

Fenway Bergamot Sleeveface

Fenway Bergamot by Scarydan

... priceless! :) Along with Dan's personal reaction to 'Homeland'.

The Consequences of Crucifixion

A remake of a Laurie Anderson joke, told in 'Transitory Life', too:

(P. S.: Having heard this in Chorzów, I could not decide whether the laughter of the Polish audience was genuine or not... nevertheless, I found it hilarious)

Laurie Anderson Has Become an Internet Meme. Period.

Source: Muaddib734 on cheezburger.

Super Cranky Opening Act for Laurie Anderson

Last night in Bucharest, Romania. No comment needed :)

"No Oreos Today. Have a Chipwich"

... The line above is an excerpt from the lyrics of 'The Laurie Anderson Song', a dead-on spoof on guesswho, done by the cast members of the comedy sketch tv series 'The State'. The track appears on their new album, 'Comedy for Gracious Living' (actually the album had been recorded back in 1996 but has been shelved since then until very recently). Here you can listen to a fragment of the song (see track 8), which sounds IMHO simply hysterical. :)

United Sleevefaces

I just can't decide which sleeveface* of United States Live is better:

Original here: sleeveface.com

Original here: Kokopelli / de Volkskrant

* sleeveface = "one or more persons obscurings or augmenting any part of the body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion. You're basically posing with the record label as though it were a part of your own body." (UrbanDictionary)

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)

Big Science Reviewed

The cover of 'Big Science', Laurie Anderson's iconic album inspired several redesigns--  serious, hilarious and trivial alike.

(Photo source: laurieanderson.com)

This is when Big Science goes Muppet. Bunsen Honeydew by Jake Myler:

(Photo source: ToughPigs)

Norn Cutson's comics-style homage:

(Photo source: Flickr)

Big Science in South Park style, built with SP Studio:

(Mnemosyne's own)

Big Science redesigned in black and red (plus some extra hair) by Aisling Farinella and Clíona O'Flaherty:

(Photo source: Flickr)

Meet Marketing Expert Mr. Fenway Bergamot

Mr. Fenway Bergamot put on his best moustache and went to the European headquarter of Nonesuch, Laurie Anderson's record company to try to take control over Laurie's ad campaign by sharing his own marketing ideas with the publicity manager:

Since it's him who graces the cover of the Homeland album, it does not need Laurie Anderson's name on it.

Having been inside Laurie's head for such a long time, he deserves to get space on the poster of 'Delusion'.

He isn't contented with the title of Laurie's live show either.

At the record store, his vinyl should be in the center of the Laurie Anderson shelf.

... meaning: all over the place.

While he also admits he's aiming for a gold, he coyly inquires if the record company has made more than 10 copies of his vinyl... in fact, there were 1,000 copies of 'Only an Expert' made all in all, and according to the publicity manager, all of them were sold.

One of the highlights of the video is the following conversation:

Fenway [referring to the vinyl]: Nobody has any record players anymore. Will anyone play that?

Publicity Manager: No, but that doesn't matter, does it.

Hilariously cynical contemporary surrealism, just Mnemosyne's favourite type of humour. :)

Oh, almost forgot: the video is featured on Fenway Bergamot's Facebook profile.

Then and Now #2: The Croc Coat

Just love the way she recycles these crazy outfits, no matter what the type of the event.

2007: a New York social moment:

(Original photo here)

2010: Sydney, Australia, Concert for Dogs. Knuckles meets Laurie Anderson, LOL:

(Original photo by dunapoo)