Thank You, B.

Thanks for the story about your father's horse.

Two of many

Uppsala, April 2010

Laurie Anderson 101 - the Audio Edition

Two hours of Laurie Anderson's music - from two recent audio portraits from Europe:


1. First, a podcast from Spain, presented by Alex Kocic / UEMCOM Radio.

• ivoox Artist of the Week: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 59 mins 21 secs, file size: 27 MB)

Playlist:

• Transitory Life
• Born, Never Asked
• White Lily
• Coolsville
• Hiawatha
• World Without End
• Speak My Language
• Washington Street
• Beginning French
• Strange Perfumes
• O Superman
• Bright Red
• Only an Expert

2. The other one comes from Stockholm: Laurie Anderson's musical portrait as part three of Sveriges Radio P4's 'Poets, Dreamers and Visionaries' series. Along with Carin Kjellman's introduction (in beautiful melodic Swedish, of course):

• Bohemen, Drömmaren och Visionären: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 55 mins 2 secs) (click to the PLAY button in the bottom banner of the page)

Playlist:

• O Superman
• The Ouija Board
• Love Among the Sailors
• From the Air
• Cartoon Song (from United States Live)
• Baby Doll
• Thinking of You
• Big Science
• Rotowhirl
• My Eyes
• The Dream Before
• In Our Sleep
• Strange Angels
• The Beginning of Memory
• The Lake
• Flow

Möte med Laurie Anderson

"I'm thinking of shows like Oprah. They approach everything like something's wrong with you... Nothing's wrong with you. You're a human being [with] some things to figure out. [...] Fix yourself."

(Laurie Anderson, 2010) 

Click to the picture to (re-)watch Laurie Anderson talking about screaming and personality design, reaching out for help and oprahfication on the sofa of the set of 'Delusion' in Uppsala, Sweden, April 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):

Random Goodness from Umeå

"I try to train myself to pull away from the screen and make sure that I stay in the real world."

(Laurie Anderson on her relation to the internet) 

Here's a short interview segment from Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio), made around the time of Laurie's Umeå performance in May 2009: on festivals and their social aspects, experimenting and the ocean of sounds we live in. To shape the original into Mnemosyne-compatible, I cut out the non-English parts:

• Laurie Anderson interview in Umeå, May 2009 (audio length: 1 min 15 secs, file size: 1.73 MB)

('Burning Leaves' in Umeå. Photo by Sara Lindquist

More photos from the concert: rockfoto.net)

From the centre of nothingness

If you "like" Fenway Bergamot, Laurie Anderson's male alter ego on Facebook, you can see a gloomy video of him walking at the Viking graves near Uppsala, Sweden. Maybe searching for the lingering shadow of long gone ancestors there...

(above: a rare moment without the crazy eyebrows that make me feel so uneasy)