Ilusión o engaño?

"It's in-between."

(Laurie Anderson's answer to the question in the title, which is "illusion or deception?"

in English translation and refers to the meaning of 'Delusion')

Listen to this morning's interview with Laurie Anderson on Radio 3 Espagna (it's partly mostly :( overdubbed in Spanish):

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.

The Charlie Rose Interview, 2003

"She does everything. She writes. She paints. She does photography. She sculpts. There's nothing she can't do. She is the absolute perfect person to go up there because she could come back to you and could put it in any kind of media you wanted."

(Lou Reed on Laurie Anderson's artistry-in-residence at NASA)

In May 2003 Laurie Anderson and Lolabelle joined Lou Reed at Charlie Rose's interview table (apparently to everybody's satisfaction). Their conversation rambled from 'NYC Man' (Lou Reed's then-recently released retrospective song collection), through Andy Warhol, to the aspects of the relationship between Lou and Laurie.

(FYI: This video had been hosted by Google and was 'rescued' to YouTube since Google has recently gave up video hosting.)

Eerie Purple Clouds Moving around the Notes

At last - part three of Deirdre Mulrooney's Skype interview has arrived: "On 2011 projects, Lolobelle, and Inter-species Communication" (plus Laurie's violin, the evolution of 'Delusion'; Leonard Cohen and walking on the spine of a dinosaur).

Looks like a prolific year Laurie is looking forward to - just a couple of tags in advance: a new book! Short songs on violin! 3D movie installations! Interpreting the way fish move via violin playing for blind people! Walking in Ireland!

(Vulgo.ie has also put the transcript of the interview online oh, they removed it.)

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!

Intervista Laurie Anderson

"When economics goes down, art gets better. Because people improvise. [...] People will not stop making art, no way. They will make it in a different way. And it can be then exciting. [...] It will never disappear."

(Laurie Anderson on RAI TV, November 2010)

Click to the picture to watch a recent web exclusive interview with Laurie Anderson made for RAI TV in Firenze, Italy.

(Some tags for the impatient: Miracle in Milan. Balzac. Political-personal-mental delusion. Motivations. Politics = stories = acts of imagination. Invasion of words / language / music. Crying. Tyranny of the rectangle. The importance of teaching. Economics and art. Capitalist Realism. Inspiration from Lolabelle. Lolabelle's Christmas record. 1,000 chicken waiting for being named. Cows with open stomachs. "Children" with problems.)

"I like to do things that I don't know how to do for fun."

WKCR's (Columbia University's radio station) 'Arts and Answers' show featured a recent interview with Laurie Anderson on September 30, 2010. Unfortunately I missed the show by one day but Annie Minoff, the programme's host was kind enough to provide me with the stream which I am proudly presenting here, on Files on a String. Thank you, Annie!

Annie Minoff talked with Laurie Anderson in her studio about 'Delusion' and "the sensation she calls mental drift", Laurie's wunderhund Lolabelle who has just finished her Christmas record, various manifestations of one mother, Fenway Bergamot's "different ways", the "insane third of everyone's lives" (i. e. dreams), Laurie's retrospective performance called 'Transitory Life', audience personalites and many more.

• 'Arts and Answers' Interview with Laurie Anderson on WKCR (audio length: 30 mins 1 sec; the stream will open in a new window)

Lolabelle goes solo

Left paw, right paw, treat? Sit. Right paw. Woof! Alright. Woof! Right paw. Treat? No. Let's try it one octave lower... Two octaves. Treat, pretty please?

Sit. Left paw. Can't feel the vibe. Now... yeah, that's better. Woof! Treat? No? Ok, now change the chord. Dominant note. Let's descend to D minor. Woof!

Hören ist wissen.

German radio station Deutschlandfunk featured a Laurie Anderson portrait by Christiane Rebmann on the 16th of August, 2010: a collage of excerpts from an interview made in Hamburg during this year's soccer world cup, plus songs from 'Homeland'. Caution: German voice-over. (But hopefully some of you, who can be silent in four (five, six, seven...) languages, will appreciate it.)

• Deutschlandfunk's Laurie Anderson Portrait, Part One (audio length: 10 mins 42 secs, file size: 14.7 MB): 50% baseball stadium, 50% Proust, air and the imperfections in 'Homeland', stories that don't have a simple solution, the heavy quotation marks around 'Homeland', untrue but good stories, the polemic white rap named 'Only an Expert'...

• Deutschlandfunk's Laurie Anderson Portrait, Part Two (audio length: 8 mins 42 secs, file size: 11.9 MB): favourite Saturday clothes and wedding ceremonies, Lolabelle's Jerry Lee Lewis technique, the multitasking human mind, the most stupid e-mail that Laurie received in the last 24 hours, sleeping self turning legal age... just the usual Laurie Anderson stuff ;)

Lolabelle in da house!

Watch Lolabelle, Laurie Anderson's musical Wunderkind Wunderhund getting into the groove:

(video source: Italian Vanity Fair)

'Talking Animals' on WMNF Radio

Now in this show there are a lot of stories about talking animals; and about people who try to communicate with them.

Talking Animals' guest was Laurie Anderson via telephone on WMNF Radio today. They talked about - of course - Lolabelle, her illness and the music therapy, the dog concert in Sydney, singing trees in Basel (the installation is going to open soon and will be available for three years), music about fish for blind people, 'Only an Expert' and this year's Mermaid Parade on Coney Island where Laurie was Queen Mermaid, Lou Reed was King Neptune and Lolabelle was the Royal Mer-Dog.

The programme is probably going to be available to download later from the show's website but till then, here it is:

• introduction (audio length: 0 mins 38 secs, file size: 0.9 MB)

• part 01 (audio length: 4 mins 16 secs, file size: 5.86 MB)

• part 02 (audio length: 7 mins 22 secs, file size: 10.1 MB)

• part 03 (audio length: 8 mins 19 secs, file size: 11.4 MB)

• the whole show in one, minus intro (audio length: 20 mins 55 secs, file size: 28.7 MB)

The 'Homeland' Zoo

Getting absorbed in the world of Laurie Anderson's 'Homeland' led me to the following fun revelation: that animals appearing in various aspects of the album almost could fill a zoo.


Take, for example, The Beginning of Memory, with the billions and billions of songbirds circling around in the sky, and the lark, whose father dies one day, and whose decision to bury the corpse in her own head marks the beginning of memory.


There's one more bird - another songbird - in 'Homeland': the robin that sings the song of long lost love in Strange Perfumes. Oh, and let's not forget the sky-flying birds at the beginning of Thinking of You.


Some mammals also pop up here and there throughout the album: right at the start, Transitory Life's mouse who realizes that he's in a trap, and, from then on, he is literally condemned to death. [Not really a vision for sore eyes.] And, of course, Lolabelle, who leaves her mark on Bodies in Motion by her barking and playing the piano in her sweet, eccentric way.


Then there's Only an Expert that not only mentions the Pet Solution, but its updated lyrics also contain fish poisoned by, and ducks and dolphins completely coated with oil that spilled out into the ocean.


... plus a bonus from Mambo and Bling (the first vinyl of 'Homeland'):

"[...] the classic problem calculating your odds for accidents that might happen. Like, you have more chance, for example, getting hit and killed in a car crash than dying in a plane crash. But things keep changing, so you have to keep re-calculating the odds and updating the list. You you have to keep adding things like [...] being crushed by a crane falling onto your building. And you have to keep crossing other things off the list, like [...] getting trampled by hordes of horses"

Dress Code: Black and White

A semi-informative review of the LongHouse Reserve Summer Gala where Laurie Anderson was honoured with the (guess what) LongHouse award and where she told some of her stories within the frames of a newly arranged performance called "The Boat I Had As a Child" and where the attendants wore black and white clothes because the dress code was black and white.

(photo source: Profimedia)

This just in: the organizers called the gala "Excentrica" - why? "Because Laurie Anderson is eccentric".

Oh boy. Right again. Let X equal X. I bet satellites were out that night.

According to the photos, Lolabelle must have had a good time though. :)

The Spirit of Motion

A couple years ago, Lolabelle, Laurie Anderson's rat terrier contracted an aggressive form of cancer and during the medical therapy she went blind. She has overcome the illness but her pep was gone. Her worried family finally found a trainer for her who taught her to play the piano ( = tap the keys with her paws and get treats for it) and this kind of mental and physical stimulation brought her vigor back.

Recently Lolabelle herself has made a few public appearances: her keyboard playing was an attraction at the 'Homeland' release party, and, besides her majestic 'parents', Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, she was the third royal person (the Royal Mer-Dog) reigning over the annual Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.

Poor little Lolabelle, though, looks kind-of resigned / disoriented / a little bit fat (right, she has overcome a serious illness and she might constantly get those treats) in some recent photos. I do hope she feels better than she looks like. I'm sure her loving family is 100% there for her. Laurie has just recently said something like Lolabelle was working on a 'Christmas record'-- sounds promising, right? :)

(original photo here)

But what I really wanted to say is that I honestly think 'Bodies in Motion' is actually a song written for/about Lolabelle, and featuring her 'playing' the piano on that very track of 'Homeland' is more than accidental.

Laurie has occasionally told about the personality of her dog-- being a rat terrier, she loves agility training, her main motivation is simply to have fun in life. Laurie has also mentioned something like this as her own life goal, too.

So, here they are, just like twin stars, furthermore: two fellow goddesses out of some ancient Greek myth who may have total command over the world, even over other worlds, too, they can get anywhere they want to, they could see into the future, they could create a religion but all they care about is to have as much fun as possible. (Even if the weight of the world lies heavy on her shoulder-- see the Atlas --> Greek mythology reference, right?)

And to move is to have fun. Moreover: to move together is to have even more fun. To move eternally: a thing only godlike creatures are able to do. So, these two gorgeous souls unite in constant synchronic motion and love and devotion-- a couple with enviable affection towards each other.

I do hope that the world will find delight in the heartwarming sight of this for a long time to come. Or, perhaps, they are going to be there eternally. They'll grace us only when they are in the mood. Blissful souls are entitled to do so. And they most likely are of that species.