Somebody was snoring, in the audience at Laurie Anderson.
Now, half of you—or rather, some of you?—didn’t seem to believe she ever stood on ice skates on blocks of ice—skeptics! Ha! I love a good skeptical mind! But darlings, it’s documented, like the moon landing. Totally true!
Still, it’s awesome that some of you raised the question of an unreliable narrator.
At the show, listening to her words along with digital loops and amplified violin, with larger-than-life backdrop of projections that moved from clashing, aggressive flashes of abstraction and graffiti to falling rain, falling letters like snowflakes, drifting images of her longtime partner and husband, the inimitable Lou Reed, listening to her brilliance and experience, her life and art…through most of it I could hear this guy gulp on his own snore, catch himself, then fall back into the rhythm of snoring in a deep sleep. The dude was tired!
Laurie Anderson is a—
Conceptual artist.
Mixed media artist.
Storyteller.
Musician
And I thought…what if he’s working? What if he is one more loop of sound…what if he’s one more layer of humanity making noises?….I hope he was dreaming and taking in the show, in fragments.
She once said, in an interview in the New York Times, “I always had this fantasy of doing a very, very late-night radio show,” she said. “I can almost picture myself just being able to talk to people at night like that, just ramble on, half a dream, half not. And also I love listening to music at that time of night. It seeps into you in a way. That is a magic time.”
There are all kinds of dreams, right?
Where do the dimensions of a story start and end? It goes beyond the page. There’s context and subtext and the world of ideas.
And she also said, from the stage at Portland’s Keller Auditorium, how even a few words can have a tremendous effect on a person’s life. Words shape lives. It’s true, they do! Ha!
When we were leaving, a guy who looked a little like Larry David leaned over to his date and said, about the band, “Every one of them looked like Larry David!”
With his words, I was suddenly inside a walking NY’r cartoon!
Close to my heart, this art thing, stories, people, you. If you need me today, I’ll be setting up at the swap meet. Really.
xo
M
I'll be going through boxes and getting rid of junk. Want me to ship it to you to swap at the meet?
If I had only watched the video link before expressing my paranoid suspicions…