Thank You, B.

Thanks for the story about your father's horse.

Two of many

Uppsala, April 2010

Setting the Stage for 'Delusion'

By clicking to Laurie's projection above, you can browse through Seth Litroff's photo gallery from January 2010 when Laurie Anderson visited Bergen Community College (Paramus, NJ) for rehearsing for 'Delusion' which was to be premiered some weeks later at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

Painting with Light on an Enormous Canvas

Dead

stars

t  h  e  i  r    l i g h t    s  t  i  l  l

trapped

in time.

Light installation by Laurie Anderson

Sydney, Australia 2010
photo by huailimay

The picture above is part of this gorgeous photo gallery of Laurie Anderson's light installations on the sails of the Sydney Opera House during last year's VIVID Festival in Sydney, Australia.

Thanks to Darek for the URL!

About the Man

"I could totally relate to the dry salesman [persona] that he created; this very underplayed thing, just very-very removed... [He was] also very-very interested in death. And I think that's what scared Americans more than his writing itself."

(Laurie Anderson on William S. Burroughs; as heard in 'A Man Within')

A Second and a Third Self

Excerpts of an interview made in Lublin, Poland during the KODY Festival last year:

Laurie at AndrewAndrew Again, Revisited

"[The reason] why the idea of infinity didn't go over in the Middle Ages [was that] the popes were going like "What if there are infinite number of planets - is there a pope on every planet? And if so, who's top pope?""

Talk radio at its best - no need to say more :)

AndrewAndrew put a video excerpt of Laurie Anderson's recent appearance on their show on East Village Radio's website:

Out of Luck with Forum Romanum :(

Italian newspaper La Repubblica held a Q & A forum for Laurie Anderson and the readers of the newspaper in Rome, December 2010. (Although having been informed about the event right in time before travelling to Rome, no matter how hard Mnemosyne and her friends tried they could not get the information on the whereabouts and date of the forum... argh!)

Now La Repubblica's online manifestation has published a video of the event; alas, dubbed in Italian. What's more, at the expense of intelligibility. :( Anyway, enjoy what you can make out of it:

Hopefully the English translation of the transcript helps some...

UPDATE: A photo gallery of the event in the Rome section of La Repubblica.

Messiness and Chaos (and a Bunch of Other Things, Too)

"I was originally a sculptor and I love things that just don't fit into boxes. I'm really happy when I see that things don't fit."

(Laurie Anderson, October 2010)

KUSF Radio (San Francisco) recently aired a conversation between Laurie Anderson and radio DJ Bryan Chandler, originally recorded in October 2010. Now you can listen to the whole two-hour-long Laurie Anderson Special in KUSF Radio's online archive - with a detailed introduction to Laurie's career by Bryan Chandle.



If you are interested in only the interview, here it is, cut into three parts - I edited the songs out and did some noise reduction on the audio:

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part One (audio length: 6 mins 31 secs, file size: 8.96 MB)

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part Two (audio length: 5 mins 59 secs, file size: 8.24 MB)

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part Three (audio length: 7 mins 44 secs, file size: 10.6 MB)

(Impatient? Here's some tags for you: 'Homeland', workaholism, Karl Marx, 'Transitory Life', 'Delusion', progress, old hard drives and altitude, messiness and chaos, wedding, yawning, lip-synching, TV-B-Gone, food porn, Ken Nordine - who could wish for more.)


FYI: the list of songs that were played:

Flow
Let X = X
It Tango
Only an Expert remix
Sharkey's Day
Transitory Life
O Superman
Is Anybody Home
Strange Perfumes

Another Day in America
Sharkey's Night
Falling
Only an Expert
Accompanied by Ghosts
Difficult Listening Hour
The Ugly One with the Jewels

Zero. Nothing. Has-been. Clod. Zilch. Nada.

"Overall the talk between Laurie and Charles Seife was very interesting: beginning of memory, nothingness, emptiness, morality of numbers, zero and infinity, Laurie's favourite books (How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson, Hebrew Alefbet book which Laurie referenced a lot). Lou Reed was present, as well as Antony. The Q & A session touched on issues of expanding universe, vacum and numbers."

(excerpt from Darek's review of Laurie Anderson + Charles Seife
in RMA's "Talk About Nothing" Series)

Laurie Anderson and Charles Seife Talking about Nothing

Rubin Museum, NYC, December 2010

(FYI: click to the photo above for an extensive photo gallery of the event)

Double Treat

"The time in 'Flow' is very odd - instead of bars, you'll wait seven beats until the next phrase and it's kind of, "Woah, what time signature is that in." It's in the time signature of regret or something, sort of flowing."

(Laurie Anderson on her Grammy-nominated violin piece 'Flow')

1. Listen to Mike Ragogna's interview with Laurie Anderson, recorded from KRUU-FM (broadcasting from Fairfield, Iowa):

• part one (audio length: 13 mins 57 secs, file size: 19.2 MB)

• part two (audio length: 14 mins 21 secs, file size: 19.7 MB)

[note: songs edited out]


2. Read the transcript in the Huffington Post.

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!

Jazzed.

Flow. Grammy. After-Valentine. Public Library. Delusion. Go. Listen. Read:

Laurie Anderson blogging on The Comet.

This time for real. (?) Along with photos.

Fenway Bergamot Sleeveface

Fenway Bergamot by Scarydan

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

Rome Coverage

Click to the picture above for Mauro Fagiani's concert photos of Laurie Anderson's 'Delusion' in Rome, Italy, December 2010.


Plus Italian tv's reportage about Laurie Anderson's and Nina Hagen's recent performances in Rome:

Laurie Anderson in Garantat 100%

"I don't see any perfect way to tell a story."

"I think it would be good to have an artist-in-residence in the Supreme Court, the Congress, the White House... artists see the world differently than politicians."

"I try to be a good observer and see what's going on, and to mix that with fantasy."

"You're born with anger, too, and real rage, Shakespearean rage. A two-year-old has Shakespearean rage, they just can't express it."

"I'm not the kind of person who's going "please put me on your magazine cover because I want people to look at me". And the reason is that I'm a snob. I don't really care, actually. I came from the art world into the pop culture and I thought it was idiotic. Pop culture in America is made for ten-year-olds. Nothing against ten-year-olds, they should have their stuff. I came from another world where we thought "maybe let's make something for other people than ten[-year-olds]"."

[All quotes by Laurie Anderson, as heard in a conversation with Cătălin Ştefănescu in Romanian cultural talk show 'Garantat 100%']

"Forget the Message."

"If artists just had messages to deliver in a work of art, you could just write your message down, you wouldn't have to make your symphony, etc... Forget the message. It's just something that makes us go... TAAH!"

(Laurie Anderson, November 2010)

Watch the first video of Mnemosyne's own Youtube channel: it's the trailer for the Romanian cultural talk show 'Garantat 100%'. Laurie Anderson was a guest of the show during her stay in Bucharest, Romania in November 2010.

Concert Photography from Italia

Laurie Anderson in Firenze, Nov 2010

photo by Carlo Valentini

Laurie Anderson in Italy, 1988

Photo by Carlo Valentini

Hint: click to any of the photos for more Laurie Anderson concert portraits from Italy by photographer Carlo Valentini.

That's It!

By clicking to the picture below, watch a reportage of I in U, Laurie Anderson's retrospective exhibition, and her latest version of 'Duets on Ice' in São Paulo, Brazil...

...and get lost in the beauty of visuals and sounds. Video by Raphael Lupo and Adolfo Borges.

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.

But It All Looks the Same.

"Look at all the things I've bought
I can't believe what they cost
Just a lot of plastic and numbers on my credit card"

iPhone-a-string @ Stanford
May 2010

Photo source: Flickr / livelyarts

Lyrics excerpts from 'Dark Angel' by Laurie Anderson