Out of the darkness, a voice:

"Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the
air. And some of these objects will be useful. And some of them will
just be...odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people
free enough to think of making them in the first place. The United
States helps, not harms, developing nations by using their natural
resources and raw materials."

The voice is hushed, wry and seductive, weird and funny. It comes from
a shadowy figure at center stage, a slender, androgynous-looking
person whose spiky haircut frames an angelic, dimpled face. 

Illuminated only by the slides and films projected onto a giant movie
screen behind her, Laurie Anderson goes on to tell a story about how
some American farmers during a drought began renting their silos to
the Federal Government for the storage of nuclear missile heads. Her
narration is illustrated on the screen by a photonegative image of the
State of Liberty overlapping a film of the American flag spinning
around and around in a clothes dryer. The red stripes flicker like
flames at the glow-in-the-dark hem of Lady Liberty. As Anderson turns
to face the screen and play a soaring solo on an electric violin, she
becomes a mad empress overlooking a radioactive cityscape, her music
evoking the whines of sirens and the sobs of people.

These are but a few fleeting images from the performance-art work
United States, which Laurie Anderson has been composing and showing in
parts for several years. The complete version of this four- part,
two-evening extravaganza is currently receiving its world premiere at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music, thus capping the meteoric rise of an
oddball adept in an avant-garde medium: performance art. John
Rockwell, a music critic of the New York Times has said that Laurie
Anderson's specialness lies in the diversity of her talent: she is at
once a composer, lyricist, singer and electronic wizard. What the
35-year-old Laurie Anderson also possesses after a decade in the art
form is something no other performance artist has ever had:
popularity. 

"O Superman," which Anderson wrote and recorded with a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts, went to No. 2 on the British charts
after Warner Bros. Records bought and released it in England in the
fall of 1980, and a later album, Big Science, which includes "O
Superman," has sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide. To promote her
album, Laurie Anderson for the first time forsook her usual art spaces
to play rock venues on a tour across the country last spring, and when
her eight-day stand at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is over, she will
take United States on a 16-city tour of Europe and the United
States. When a major pop-record label and a high culture musical
institution join forces to endorse an experimental artist, it strongly
suggests that performance art has infiltrated the mainstream after a
decade or more of appealing mainly to the arty Soho crowd in the lofts
and basements of lower Manhattan.

The term "performance art" has been applied retroactively to describe
many kinds of animate art since the early days of the century, when
Russian Futurists strolled the streets of old St. Petersburg with
homemade tattoos on their cheeks and published manifestoes explaining
"Why We Paint Ourselves." But the term first came into general usage
about 10 years ago as a catchall label for a multitude of artistic
activities so new and varied that even today critics quarrel over what
is and what isn't performance art. The narrow definition might be
"performance by artists," and the modern manifestations of this have
roots in the Futurists' cafe and cabaret "evenings" and the Dada
frolics of post-World War I Europe, which were essentially an excuse
for visual artists to step out of their studios and have fun -- to
paint themselves instead of their canvases. In a broader sense,
performance art has become a useful term to describe the work of an
increasing number of artists who function in several discplines and do
not neatly fit into any traditional category. Some of these multimedia
performers seem in pursuit of the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk,
the united art work using every genre in an effort to represent the
whole of human nature. If such aspirations seem pretentious, still
they are a healthy reaction to the reductio ad absurdum of modernism
and it's last, "minimalist" gap.

After World War II, there occurred a leveling of the cultural
landscape -- a Hiroshima of the arts. Reinterpreting Marcel Duchamp's
dictum, "Anything can be art," for postwar America, the composer John
Cage declared that the purpose of art was "simply" to make us "wake up
to the very life we're living." Cage's influence inspired countless
experiments which effectively reduced art to the tiniest increments of
human activity, glorifying everyday behavior. This was the logical,
and perhaps inevitable, extension of modernism's quest to locate the
essence of each art and to express only that essence. But minimalism
transformed the notion of purification into a reductive impulse, and
that impulse could go too far, stripping art not only of impurities
but also of joy and content.

Oppressive though it may have proved as a tradition, minimalism did
leave a clean slate for artists. Just as computerization has found a
way to convert all forms of information into bits of electronic
"memories" that can be stored in and quickly retrieved from a magic
machine, modernism has broken down the individual art forms into a
pool of elements available to all artists, whatever form they
favor. And it is the performance artists who have taken up the
challenge of recombining speech, song, images, movement, and modern
technology in new ways.

In its fetish for mixing media, today's performance art most resembles
the "happenings" of the 1960s. The brainchildren of Allan Kaprow, a
professor of art, "happenings" were often aggressively chaotic events
employing words, music, sound, lighting, and actions. They were
usually performed one time only for an audience of observer-
participants. Many of the important young painters of the time -- Red
Grooms, Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine -- did "happenings" as well as
their more conventional work. Testing John Cage's elastic definition
of an artist's materials, "happenings" to some extent reflected the
anti-materialism of the 1960s youth culture by rejecting the
marketplace or museum-piece conception of art -- they produced no
objects that could be bought or preserved. In the 1970s, performance
art reinstated the clear distinction between audience and performer,
sometimes emphasizing the primacy of the performer with a
vengeance. Probably the most extreme art performer of the period was
Chris Burden, who once had himself nailed to a Volkswagen in a mock
crucifixion, and, in a piece entitled "Shot," had a friend fire a real
bullet into his arm from 15 feet away.

Today's performance artists are more concern with searching for ways
to combine their private visions with public concerns. And after a
hermetic decade, it seems a sign of developing maturity that
performance artists are now tapping the rock-music world, television
and the theater for ways to reach a mass audience.

Laurie Anderson embodies both the visual-art component of performance
art and its multimedia aspect. She is an accomplished sculptor and
photographer -- an exhibition of her art objects mounted by the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is currently touring England
and Scotland -- yet in performance she plays a violin and keyboard
instruments, sing-speaks in a sly, friendly voice and always brings
along a giant movie-screen backdrop for the slides and films that
supply the visual dimension of her compositions. The visuals, all of
which are her own work, sometimes illustrate but usually have only a
tangential or poetic relationship to the songs. When Anderson waxes
romantic, murmuring, "Your eyes -- it's a day's work to look into
them," fat white clouds drift across a deep blue sky on the screen
behind her. And when accompanied by horror-movie wolf howls, a huge
photo of a three-pronged wall socket looks like a child's frightened
face -- an image at once humorous and strangely moving.

Speaking of Anderson's effect on performance art, a fellow
practitioner, 24-year-old Tim Miller, who belongs to a generation
young enough to take the art form for granted, explains: "Performance
art has a tradition of boredom, of extended time, of
repetition. People didn't want to have anything to do with it. That's
why Laurie is so important. She's popular, but epic; show-biz, but
avant-garde."

Born in Wayne, Ill., in 1947 and raised amid a large, affluent family,
Laurie Anderson studied art history at Barnard College in the late
1960s and then dabbled in sculpture and music before turning to
performance art. "I tried to be as quirky as I could," she recalled
recently.

Quirkiness came easily. Anderson's best-known sculpture from that
period looks like an ordinary table, but a viewer placing his elbows
on the table and his hands over his ears can hear music conducted
through wood and bone from a concealed tape deck. A musician since
childhood, Anderson invented instruments such as the tape-bow violin,
which replaces the traditional horsehair bow with a strip of audio
tape, and composed simple songs and sound pieces for it. One such
composition, performed in a series cosponsored by the St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra and the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, featured elegantly
dressed classical musicians whose tape-bow violins emitted a sound
mixture of voices and bongo drums.

Anderson's first appearance as a performance artist consisted of
orchestrating a symphony of car horns at a drive-in bandshell in
Vermont. Another early routine involved playing a violin while wearing
skates embedded in blocks of ice, all the while talking about the
parallels between skating and violin-playing, both of which require
balance -- skate blades over ice, bow over violin bridge. When the ice
melted, the performance was over.

Although Anderson was merely one among dozens of young performance
artists groping for a form to match their imagination during the early
1970s, she did have a useful talent for being in the right place at
the right time. She fell in with a motley group of artists who
participated in collective performances organzied by the entrepreneur
Jean Dupuy in his 13th Stret loft and at the Kitchen in Soho. One of
several centers that sprang up to exhibit performance art, the Kitchen
also arranged touring expeditions to other hospitable performance
spaces across the country and abroad, and Anderson quickly plugged
into this circuit.

Probably the turning point of Anderson's career was her appearance at
the 1978 Nova Convention, where, through an electronic filter that
made her voice sound like a frog's, she performed a monologue from
"Americans on the Move," the first section of United States. A tribute
to the writer and perverse visionary William S. Burroughs, the Nova
Convention brought together an unprecedented collision of poets (Allen
Ginsberg, John Giorno), composers (John Cage, Philip Glass), punk
rockers (Patti Smith, the B-52's), and performance artists.

Emboldened by the punk example to experiment with using a rock band,
Anderson became more and more drawn to the world of intermedia, a
realm already inhabited by others who were forging their own
cross-disciplinary forms. Meredith Monk, for instance, originally a
choreographer, has been creating large-scale pieces since the mid-'60s
and calling them "operas" or "live movies" or "theater cantatas," but
they are all performance collages that attempt to transcend the
barriers between dance, theater, and music. Composer Robert Ashley
began using television in 1975 to add dimensions to his minimalist
rock music. A sampling from his television opera Perfect Lives
(Private Parts), shown on the Public Broadcasting System in 1981,
features particularly exciting work by the video artists John Sanborn
and Kit Fitzgerald. Mabou Mines, a nine-member theater collective
founded in 1970, has a direct-address style of performing, a boundless
fascination with high-tech gadgetry and an extraordinary concern for
the visual elements of its members' work (they hire sculptors rather
than set designers, for instance) that link them as strongly to
performance art as to theater. JoAnne Akalaitis's Dead End Kids, for
example, is a sort of intellectual vaudeville that uses film, dance,
music, and comedy to compile a history of nuclear power, while another
director in the collective, Lee Breuer, calls his Shaggy Dog Animation
and Hajj performance poetry.

The performance art of Laurie Anderson and the intermedia form of her
United States -- the pop-collage style of performance, the poetic use
of technology, the attempt to make videos images "dance" to music --
are to some extent a composite of elements from the work of these
seminal artists. But if she did not create the intermedia model,
Anderson has certainly brought it to a larger audience than any of her
predecessors, who still seem intimidatingly experimental to the
general public.

While many artists acknowledge that performance art is their way of
seizing the means of theater -- present time and public space --
without its cumbersome conventions of plot and character, Anderson is
one who makes a clear distinction between her work and
theater. "Traditional plays invent characters, change them, and
predict their postplay lives," she explained in the 1979 premiere
issue of Performance Art Magazine. Her approach, she said, leaves her
"freer to be disjunctive and jagged and to focus on incidents, ideas,
collisions...Personally, I feel closer to the attitude of the stand-up
comedian -- not only because I believe that laughter is extremely
powerful but because the comedian works in real time."

Anderson's sense of humor exhibits itself not so much in jokes or
one-liners as in expert timing and cagey delivery. In performance, she
often distorts her naturally mellifluous voice with electronic
filters, creating multiple personalities. In "Walk the Dog," a song
about finding strangeness in the most familiar things, one such device
pitches her voice helium-high, so that when she makes delirious
exclamations she sounds like an idiot child. The same filter sinks her
voices two octaves to produce an exaggeratedly masculine croaking that
suggeests the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street trapped inside a
computer.

Anderson's best songs fuse electronics with sustained exercises in
wordplay. Her British hit record, "O Superman," for instance, begins
with a tape loop of Anderson's voice murmuring "Ha, Ha, Ha..." in a
metronomic fashion that continues as background throughout the song's
nine-minute length. Meanwhile, Anderson channels her voice through a
vocoder, which alters it into robotlike sounds, and stitches together
everyday expressions in a manner that is both comical and
disturbing. After a standard automatic phone-answering message -- "Hi,
I'm not home right now" -- and a familiar response -- "Hello, this is
your mother" -- comes a more ominous message: "Here comes the
planes. They're American planes. Made in America. Smoking or
nonsmoking?" Next, the postman's credo, "Neither snow nor rain nor
gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of
their appointed rounds," is juxtaposed with another official-sounding
but somehow sinister recitation: "'Cause when love is gone, there's
always justice; and when justice is gone, there's always force; and
when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!" The song concludes
with an eerie petition: "So hold me, Mom, in your long arms, in your
automatic arms...your petrochemical arms, your electronic arms, in
your military arms."

Evocative as they are on records, Anderson's songs don't become
complete until performed live. Those loaded images of "American
planes" and unstoppable "couriers," that revered "Superman" and the
mother with "petrochemical arms," link myth and menace, military arms
and their maternal counterparts.

The image of the American flag in the clothes dryer is particularly
rich with possible meanings, coming as it does at the end of the first
evening of United States and lingering onstage long enough to inspire
several interpretations. When Anderson serenades the glow-in-the- dark
Statue of Liberty, the immediate connotation is that of a nuclear-age
Nero. Originally a gesture welcoming immigrants to America, the statue
now seems to warn them away. Then it can become the picture of this
small girl facing a ghostly reflection of her world, like something
out of Lewis Carroll -- Alice Down the Missile Silo?

Perhaps other associations would occur, but Anderson turns back to the
audience and says: "Breadbasket. Melting pot. Meltdown. Shutdown."
Blackout.

The first time I met Anderson, it was the fall of 1980. She had just
mounted a brief run of United States Part II at the Orpheum Theater,
an Off-Broadway theater on the Lower East Side, which was so
successful that several additional performances were
scheduled. Anderson greeted me in front of her Canal Street loft with
a flashlight; the elevator was broken and she had to lead me up five
treacherous, pitch-black flights of stairs. The top floor was safe,
spacious, sunny. We settled down with coffee.

Anderson is more fragile in person than she is onstage. She looks like
a baby chick; her features are delicate, her skin almost translucent,
and when she combs her punk-cropped hair with her fingers, she simply
pulls it straight up in the middle. But her manner is the same
everywhere -- soft-spoken, quick, intelligent. You want to ask her:
Why do you perform? What is your musical background? What does love
mean to you? How did you get on the international poetry/art circuit?
Who does your hair?

Instead, she tells you stories. There's no such thing as a brief
answer: every detail must be recounted. Then too, each story suggests
dozens of other interesting and illuminating stories, none of which
she is too busy or too impatient to tell. 

As we spoke, the phone interrupted every few minutes. Anderson didn't
have an agent (the Warner Bros. recording contract was still in the
future) and she preferred to handle all the requests for performances
and lectures herself. She tours a lot, she said, mostly in Europe.

"I feel most comfortable working in places where there are no
electrical power problems, and that means Germany, which is probably
my least favorite country in the world. I have tremendous conflicts
about it because they've been the most supportive to me. They say, 'Ve
love your vork! Come! Do it!' And you just go and everything's set up
for you, every piece of equipment works, they are ready, and it is so
automatic, it is frightening! I mean, I'd rather be blowing fuses in
Italy, I really would. At the same time, I like to do things that
don't have technical fuck-ups, so I do a lot of things there. I had
some real weird experiences a few years ago, though. I was in Germany
performing with a dancer who was completely, legally slandered by the
press because she was Jewish. The reviews would start, 'Anderson, oh
yes, yes, very good,' and then go on to describe this dancer in the
most fascistic terms I've ever heard in my life. Our mouths were just
hanging open."

What did they say? "They said, 'Semitic, paranoid creature who is
dirty, she's just dirty.' You couldn't believe it. We said, listen,
you can keep your money, we're just gonna go, and here's our letter
saying why we're doing this. Our next concert was in Copenhagen, and
when we went up there it really felt like some kind of flight. I swore
I would never work in Germany again. Then, like a complete idiot, the
next time somebody called and said they had some wonderful opportunity
for me in Hamburg, I went. Because it was a wonderful opportunity. I'm
really embarrassed about it; it's a terrible conflict. The funny thing
is, the French call Americans the New Germans. So do the Dutch, though
it's getting a lot easier to work in Holland since the Moluccans came
over.

"Do you know about that? The Moluccans were a Dutch colony, and the
government said, 'Well, we know that we gave you a hard time and stole
all your spices and worked you to the bone, so if you want to come
back to Holland you can be on welfare.' Well, hundreds of thousands of
Moluccans got on the boat! Now, you have to understand that those
countries are totally homogenous. The Dutch are all pleasant little
blond people with the shoes and the hair, and here came all these wild
men and wild women. Suddenly, Holland is, like, a quarter black. And
they don't know what to do. They've been totally critical of American
racial problems -- you know, 'Why can't those Americans get it
together?' They're finally going, 'Ohhh -- it's really hard, isn't
it?' It's really, really hard when someone who's so totally, basically
different from you in every way is living next door. It's such a
cliche, but there isn't a pluralistic society like the United States
in Europe. I think that's why I've been focusing on the subject in
this series; since I'm away so much and I'm identified as an American,
I have to come to terms with it when someone calls me a New German."

Somewhat facetiously I asked Anderson whether she considers herself
primarily a composer or a writer or a performance artist. "If
anything, I consider myself a linguist," she said -- which surprised
me at first, even though while she recounted various fabulous
experiences (medical miracles, mostly) and describing her earlier
performances, I found myself doodling in my notebook the words
"archaeology of language." It's true that even her most superficial
songs degenerate into sophisticated wordplay. And although the only
foreign languages she speaks are French and a little Italian, she's
obviously well versed in music, gesture, sign language, semiotics and
other object languages. This interest has an early genesis: she has
twin brothers six years her junior who, at an early age, developed a
language of their own that became the focus of a lengthy study by
doctors interested in twin language.

"There were 10 people in my family, and we did a lot of things
together," said Anderson. "Everything was a production number; we had
uniforms and everything. It was the situation of a big house in the
country, lots of animals, stained-glass windows, tennis courts, golf
course, swimming pool -- it's like a country club."

Papa Anderson, now retired, was in paint; the children are all members
of the board. "We're not billionaires," she admitted, "but we got what
we wanted." A lot of artists, as Anderson pointed out, "seem to have a
weird thing with their parents about what they choose to do. I've
never done anything that wasn't utterly wonderful to my father."
Anderson's linguistic approach to performance is also a product of the
times. She began her career in the late '60s, just when ideas about
contemporary sculpture and painting and music and writing began to
overlap. "I was writing a lot of art criticism at that time, and as
the rookie critic I got assigned to all those minimal sculpture
shows. So I had to come up with a lot of synonyms for 'clean,'
'precise.' I was rifling through my dictionary trying to be a precise
critic, and the precision of the work went into me, too; it's
contagious.

"One of the first sound pieces I ever did was about that, too. It was
a pillow with a silk-screened open book on it -- it was van Gogh's
diary -- and inside it was a small speaker. You had to rest your head
on the pillow to hear this song, which was called 'Unlike Van Gogh.'
The story was something that came out of writing that kind of
criticism. At that time my favorite artist was van Gogh, because of
his intensity. I wanted somehow, in contrast to the cool work that was
being done, to keep another view in the foreground, so I would mention
his name in every review that I wrote. 'This artist, like van Gogh,
uses yellow and blue.'

"Eventually, this editor called me in and said, 'Not every artist can
be usefully compared to van Gogh.' I could see his point, but at the
same time I couldn't really edit that out because I felt very strongly
about it. So the reviews began to read, 'This artist, unlike van
Gogh...' whatever. It was a short career. Actually, I wrote for three
or four years for various art magazines. I liked doing that a lot --
mostly because I liked seeing what was in other people's
refrigerators."

Which strikes me as the most important ingredient in Anderson's
art. Where so much of performance art's experimentation is formidably
formal, Anderson's is essentially friendly. The directness and
personal involvement that are performance art's chief assets are here,
but Anderson expresses her ideas on so many levels -- literal,
private, metaphorical -- that her work steers clear of self-indulgence
and mere autobiography. Like Lily Tomlin, her performance skills and
nimble wit allow her to suggest multiple personalities within one
frail body. Besides, the work is funny, musically accessible and
topical in a way that says, "Hey, this is what it's like to live and
breathe and think and play in New York on Earth right here right now!"

When I visited her loft again recently, Laurie Anderson and sundry
associates were gearing up for her Brooklyn appearance, and every
corner of the recently renovated space, now divided into living areas,
rehearsal space and a 16-track recording studio, bustled with quietly
frantic activity.

At the end of the loft space, opposite a 9-foot by 12-foot projection
screen hanging from the ceiling, Perry Hoberman, Anderson's
projectionist and mechanical right-hand man, tested a tableful of
equipment. In performance, Anderson uses two conventional slide
projectors and one with a mirror attachment that flashes spots of
light across the screen, along with a film projector and a film strip
-- a complicated system which Hoberman plays as if it were a Pac-Man,
cross-cutting myriad images with dazzling speed and precision.
Meanwhile, in the studio, a musical rehearsal was in progress. Two
horn players, Chuck Fisher and Bill Obrecht, practiced their parts
against a prerecorded percussion track by David Van Tieghem,
Anderson's regular percussionist, who also performs outside the
group. Anderson herself added a few chords on her Oberheim synthesizer
while casually consulting with Roma Baran, who produced her single and
album and generally serves as an assistant music director. Baran's
dog, Brandy, napped underneath a large studio console full of knobs,
switches, and blinking lights.

Next door, Anderson's all-purpose laundry/darkroom/editing studio was
temporary unpeopled. A long counter top brimmed with film canisters,
editing paraphernalia, slide carousels, reels of film labeled "White
Clouds" and "Horses Passing," and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
slides lined up in long rows divided by cards that read "Snowy Day,"
"Bowling," and "Faucets." Surveying this atmosphere of creative
clutter, one can hardly imagine how it all comes together. Sometimes
it doesn't. "When there are so many machines, there are a million
things that can happen," Laurie Anderson admitted. But after settling
at the kitchen table and nervously lighting the half-cigarette she
allows herself hourly, she quickly added that "breakdown is important
to me. It's exciting to try to improvise."

Throughout the loft, bookshelves bulged with volumes bearing the word
"America" in their titles, from the American Heritage History of the
Law in America to Weird America. The talk turned to how United States
came into being. "Since I tour a lot, especially in Europe," she said,
"I've frequently found myself sitting across the dinner table from
people who ask me, 'How can you live in a country like that?' I really
am on the defensive a lot of the time, and I need to have some way to
deal with that.

"The idea was to make a big portrait of the country," she said, "and I
divided it up sort of arbitrarily into four parts: transportation,
politics, money, and love. If there's any throughline, it's some
question about America as Utopia and trying to understand how people
really feel about living here.

"I've been using as a sourcebook The Machine in the Garden," she
explained, referring to Leo Marx's classic study of American culture,
which discusses the dreams and impressions of people who came over in
the 1600s and 1700s and thought this was Arcadia, the lovely garden
setting they had been seeking.

"For me," she continued, "that vision of Utopia is very bound up with
technology. This is a country where the machine was supposed to free
people from menial tasks, where we wouldn't have the sweatshops and
steel mills that England had. I think we've found out how quickly you
can mess up a country, how much a machine like just the car can change
things utterly. 

"It's not that I object to any of that stuff," Anderson said. "Another
theme of my work is how to live with technology and how to accept
it. How to humanize it.

"I'm hoping to have a revelation this week about how to describe this
idea of Utopia I'm getting at. The piece begins with a story about
upstate New York being mistaken for the Garden of Eden, and I want to
end the whole thing like Huckleberry Finn, where people sort of light
out for the territories. But there aren't any new frontiers
left. Outer space is not a dream anymore, not for me. So where do you
go?"

Of course, Laurie Anderson did come up with an ending for United
States, but the question of where to go next still looms large in her
own career. Her bridging of the Soho art world, the commercial pop
scene, and high-art concert halls is a remarkable accomplishment, but
now she faces the dilemma of maintaining her goals and integrity as an
artist while remaining attractive to her newfound audience. With an
advance from Warner Bros. Records, Anderson recently bought a $40,000
synthesizer called a Synclavier to use in her next project, a combined
record album and videodisk. And Anderson is sufficiently secure in her
intentions that she can even make fun of her art, herself, technology,
and Warner Bros.

"There's a section about Warner Bros. in part three of United
States. I hope they don't mind," she said with a wicked gleam in her
eye. "First of all, I point to all this expensive equipment on the
stage, the state-of-the-art stuff with which I cast my spell, and I
make the point that this stuff doesn't grow on trees. That's when the
Warner Bros. insignia comes on the screen with all these dollar signs
floating by.
"Then I tell this story where I come into their office and say, 'I
have this vision of myself as part of a long tradition of American
humor -- you know, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner....'

"And they say, 'Well, we had something more adult in mind.'

"And then I just go, 'Oh, don't worry. I can adapt!'"

This is a composite of two articles: a cover story for the Soho News
published November 5, 1980, and a feature in the New York Times
Magazine, February 6, 1983




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HomePage of the Brave: Laurie Anderson by
 
JimDavies 
(jim@jimdavies.org)