From A'dam with Luv

Laurie Anderson's Delusion was part of this year's Holland Festival in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Reviews of the show were mixed - some would have fancied more music, and some were just bored and wished for a little less Laurie Anderson clones in the audience. Some of the lucky ones took a walk with Laurie in the streets of Amsterdam:

Jeroen Visser and Laurie Anderson

Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2011

Some of the other lucky ones had a close encounter of the third kind with Fenway Bergamot himself sitting in a shopping window of de Bijenkorf (big warehouse in Amsterdam's Dam Square):

Fenway Bergamot, wearing a Chaplin hat and a HollandFestival jacket,
chatted with Lieven Bertels (artistic coordinator of HollandFestival)

Fenway Bergamot happily announced his intention of 

being candidate for the next President of the United States

Throwing an approving glance

at his enthusiastically cheering audience outside the shopwindow.

All photos by Mnemosyne

And, finally, a video to break your heart, too: an excerpt of the Dandelion scene from Delusion in Amsterdam:

HHugs.

Poster for Laurie Anderson's 'Delusion'

Hamburg, Germany, May 2011

photo by Mnemosyne

From Krems with Luv

Donaufestival, May 2011

Krems an der Donau, Austria

photos by Mnemosyne

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank You, B.

Thanks for the story about your father's horse.

Two of many

Uppsala, April 2010

The Song That Left Mnemosyne Speechless

Once upon a time...

"For the 50th anniversary of WNYC's FM station in June of 1994, we decided to embark on a program of commissioning music from diverse American composers to celebrate the occasion. [...] We asked the noted poet John Ashbery for a poem, and then sent it to 12 composers. Their instructions were simple: write a piece based on the poem — it did not have to be a typical voice-with-piano setting; it could use some of the text, all of the text, or none of the text. [...] In the end, a splendid concert took place on June 13, 1994, when thirteen pieces by the twelve composers had their world premieres at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall."

(WNYC Music Host John Schaefer)

Laurie Anderson was among the twelve composers involved, and she

"provided a tape piece, 'This House of Blues', in which she set her own inflected reading of the poem, in slightly rearranged form, against a soft-edged, electronically altered ensemble." 

(Allan Kozinn / The New York Times)

'This House of Blues' was later included in 'The WNYC Commissions Vol. One', released in 2002, almost completely unavailable in 2011.

After a months-long journey through the United States and half of Europe, thanks to a bunch of helpful friends, the CD has recently arrived to Mnemosyne.

The awesomeness of the song has left Mnemosyne speechless but she was convinced this song cried for visual accompaniment. And publicity. That's why she asked lukeslark to create a video for it.

Here's what Luke has to say about his creation:

"[...] decided to take a very simple approach visually, partly due to the fact that the lyrical content is quite abstract and complex and really needs to stand by itself without distraction, but also because I'm drawn increasingly to simplicity, the transparent, like the 'pellucid statues' mentioned by the daughter. Interesting how Laurie's intonation of 'she said' following the daughter's words ties the piece back to her earlier work i.e. 'It Tango'. [...]

My first thought with the song was to use tight claustrophobic blue corridors [...] - but as soon as I found the sky footage I thought, 'that's it!'."

Close open your eyes and behold.

(FYI: lyrics and credits under the video)

No Longer Very Clear 

by John Ashbery

In this house of blues...

It's true that I can no longer remember very well
The time when we first began to know each other
However, I do remember very well
The first time we met. You walked in sunlight,
Holding a daisy. You said, "Children make unreliable witnesses."

In this house of blues...

Now, so long after that time,
I keep the spirit of it throbbing still.
The ideas are still the same, and they expand
to fill vast, antique cubes.
My daughter was reading one just the other day.
She said, "How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a...
an engine."

In this house of blues...

In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us.
I do not dare to do what I fantasize doing.
With time the blue congeals into roomlike purple
That takes the shape of alcoves, landings...
Everything is like something else.
I should have waited before I learned this.

Credits:

Laurie Anderson, vocals and keyboards
Cyro Baptista, percussion
Joey Baron, drums
Greg Cohen, bass
Brian Eno, drum treatments

Sleep is where you learn to let things go.

The dead in their hideouts.

The spinning world.

Yes, sleep is a vanishing act.

And then again, so is life.

[lyrics excerpt from 'Delusion' by Laurie Anderson]

[photo by Stanford Lively Arts]

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

From Rome with Luv

(Auditorium Parco Della Musica in Rome, Italy, December 2010)

From Chorzów with Luv

Teatr Rozrywki in Chorzów, Poland

From Katowice with Luv

ASP Katowice, Poland

Signing off.

Salvador Espriu's Homeland

Trial Hymn in the Temple

by Salvador Espriu

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.

(As read by Laurie Anderson in 2008,
at the KOSMOPOLIS International Literature Fest / Made in CataluNYA.

Translation by Magda Bogin)

• Read it here - along with the other Catalonian poems read by Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

• Watch it here - this poem starts at about 33' into the video.

• Listen to it - Mnemosyne's improvised piano accompaniment to Laurie Anderson's reading (audio length: 1 min 12 secs, file size: 1.1 MB).

A True Renaissance Woman

It's about starting time of the last performance of 'Delusion' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (yes, it's going to be a matinee).

[PSA]

In times like this, Mnemosyne tends to doubt that she was born in the right continent but as those moments of imprudence fade away, others come, connected to certain mountains and ancient Arab prophets... (nevertheless, the picture is not as clear as it could be, since in this story both the 'prophet' and the 'mountain' move - but it's just life's imperfection. And stories are fun either way!)

[/PSA]

In the meantime, here's Tim Needles' interview with Laurie Anderson; made on the occasion of the New York premiere of 'Delusion'. Without going into details, Mnemosyne gives you some keywords in advance, like Laurie's new (unwritten) book, Jung's Red Book, old and rotting leaves, group personality - and let's not forget about Spalding Gray.

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):

Video of KODY Festival

A report about Laurie Anderson's and Philip Glass' performances at the KODY Festival in Lublin (Poland), May 2010:

Note: goosebumps alert at 0:35 ( = excerpt of 'One Night of Swords' from Delusion)

Kojo Nnamdi interview

Laurie Anderson was the guest at the Kojo Nnamdi Show on American University Radio WAMU on July 15, 2010. She talked about her first 'artistic' job (i. e. teaching Egyptian art history and making up the gaps in her memory by freeform storytelling), swinging between politics and poetry, the evolution of 'Homeland' from live performance into studio album, audio drag, playing and getting booed Montréal Jazz Festival, and then she was answering various listeners' questions posed via telephone and the show's online forum, for example providing us with a how-to on making a proper drum suit. Yay!!! And thanks for answering my question, Laurie. :)

• Listen to the first half of the show here (audio length: 14 mins 55 secs, file size: 20.5 MB)

• Listen to the second half of the show here (audio length: 12 mins 49 secs, file size: 17.6 MB)

I've died and gone to heaven.

I was thinking of you.
And I was thinking of you.
And I was thinking of you.
And then
I wasn't thinking of you
Anymore.


And when the tears fall
From both my eyes
They fall from my right eye
Because I love you.
And they fall from my left eye
Because I can not
Bear
You.

These are Mnemosyne's favourite lines from 'Thinking of You' and 'My Right Eye'. I heard them in this form in Uppsala for the first time, along with an ethereally beautiful musical accompaniment. During the song there were dandelions bowing on the screen behind Laurie, shot from frog perspective. Beyond doubt it was one of the most moving moments of 'Delusion'.

Now I discovered this very version had been recorded for WNYC New York Public Radio's Studio 360 programme, and can be listened to here:




Personal note: Dearreaders, if anyone of you happens to meet Laurie in person, please say thank-you for this recording on Mnemosyne's behalf.

For the record...

IMMD Moment: just received my physical copy of 'Homeland' along with an autographed vinyl. It's happening!