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Laurie Anderson
So we went to a concert
At UCSD And our seats
were down front
Right in the center
And we had a most excellent view
And I thought
That is Laurie Anderson
And I thought
That looks just like Laurie Anderson
And I thought
She sounds just like Laurie Anderson
And I thought
That is Laurie Anderson
When we arrived
There was something wrong
The seats were right
The seats were perfect
But there was something wrong
Was it the air?
Was it the light?
And it was hard to breathe
And it was getting worse
And I looked up to the lights
And in the lights
There was a smoky haze
And I thought it was my glasses
I took them off to check
But it was smoke
Or it was fog
And I thought, they tested the smoke machine
During the sound check
But that seems cheesy for Laurie Anderson
And then it occurred to me
There were fifty candles on the stage
Scattered like stars
Stolen from churches
Flickering in the darkness
And slowly
Very slowly
Filling the auditorium with smoke
And I thought
Not good
And I thought
Hard to breathe
And I thought
Especially when one has a cold
And I thought
And the show started
And Laurie Anderson did her thing
And it was good
But it could have been better
There was a bombardment
There was a bombardment
Of the senses
Or more accurately
One sense
The sense
Of smell
But it wasn't the smoke
There was that
But it wasn't the smoke
That broke the threshold
No it wasn't the smoke
It was the perfume
Every woman at the concert
Seemed to be wearing their strongest perfume
Each scent was different
Total bombardment
Extreme perfume bombardment
Nasty stuff
Particularly the person
Wearing too much sandalwood
Smack-dab in front of us
And I thought
Of second-hand smoke
And I thought
"What about second-hand perfume?"
And I thought
of the movie SAFE
And I thought
Too much
When I should have been listening
Laurie's performance was excellent
Electric violin
Spoonfed monologue
Moody backgrounds
Though at times
Just at times
I thought
That with her use
of all those dark, moody themes
Low droning notes
The slow heartbeats
During those times
I expected her, or
If not her, Martin Sheen
To say
"Whatever you do, don't get off the boat.
Absolutely goddamn right."
She told anecdotes
Funny anecdotes
Sad anecdotes
Thoughtful anecdotes
About her dog
About NASA
About the moon
About 9/11
About the end of the world
Her only regret
During her time at NASA
Was that she didn't get to ride
The vomit comet
The audience laughed
And I thought
Laurie needs Flight School
If you get a chance
Go see Laurie Anderson
Her concert is excellent
I think
But don't bring your kids
They will fall asleep
Long before
The show is over
Posted by brian at January 30, 2005 03:13 PM
Music Review: Anderson shines brilliantly Thursday, October 14, 2004 The Pittsburgh Post Gazette By Anna Rosenstein The Byham stage doesn't look like it's set for Laurie Anderson. There's one small screen showing a detail from a moonscape, a small keyboard, a lush red leather chair on loan, it seems, from a swank men's club and tens of votive candles along the stage floor burning, flickering and casting shadows around the theater. It is a scaled-down performance, at least in terms of electronic equipment. The candles actually reminded me of one of Anderson's earliest performances when, as a young art student, she stood on the streets of New York playing her violin, in ice skates, atop a block of ice. When the ice melted, the performance was over. Perhaps when the last flame dies that will be the end of "The End of the Moon." But time doesn't work that way in this piece. As is her norm, Anderson shucks linear time as much as possible in a scripted work for stage. Ideas flow from one to the next, a story seems to come out of nowhere, another stops at what seems to be the middle, to be replaced by the haunting reverberations of Anderson's violin. It's not easy to describe Anderson's work to someone who's not familiar with it. To me, it's like waking up one morning and not only realizing that everything around you -- plants, animals, maybe even inanimate objects -- has its own language, but that you can understand it. Well, that you can almost understand it, or understand it in brief, electrifying bursts. In "The End of the Moon," Anderson weaves poetry out of a vast array of topics -- beauty, her experiences as NASA's first artist-in- residence, a trip to a Californian monastery with her rat terrier, love, fear, mortality, the nature of time and the end of the universe. She forces things, or ideas of things, that shouldn't live in the same moment to crash into each other and then stands back to watch the result with you, cradled in the evocative voice of her violin. In a particularly resonant moment, Anderson talks about how certain large events change not only our perspective, but the very vocabulary we use to explain and comprehend our world. One might say that happened after the earth was discovered to be round, maybe even after the atom was split. It certainly happened, as Anderson grasps, after 9/11. For all its depth of vision, "The End of the Moon" has moments of delightful and surprising humor. This is a work that you will carry with you long after you leave the theater. The candles, thankfully, are still burning.
Hi all, Since no one has written yet about the show in Oxford, Ohio I'll try to give few of my impressions (Justin and Bronwyn how was the`meet the artist' part?). I don't want to give away to the people that have not seen the show yet but `The End of the Moon' is the best Laurie Anderson you can dream about. The stage is set with an arm-chair on our left side and single white projection board on the right side. In the center are Laurie's computers, keyboards and violin. The arm-chair reminds me a bit how a grandma would tell you stories sitting in it. It also reminds of the introduction to ART21 on PBS that Laurie did few years ago. The white screen stays with the same picture of the Moon surface most of the time. For just one or two pieces Laurie uses it to project from live camera. The show starts from the question that we know from Laurie's interview: Who taught you what Beauty is? From there she goes on talking about being NASA artist in residence (this theme would come back many times) and asking the space scientists "how do they know what colors to put on the pictures from the space?" I will not tell you all because there would be no surprise but my favorite pieces were when she talks about her terrier Lolabelle and watching our perimeters, how this has changed since September 11th. Another, at almost the end of the show, when she talks about the lovers and (I quote now but please correct my quote because I might not be exactly right): `The tear from my left eye is because I love you. The tear from my right eye is because I cannot bear you". This is also something that lingers throughout the whole show (as my partner has noticed): talking about symmetries and how we perceive them, how we comprehend opposites (War and Peace) in the same sentence. The music is just amazing! Solo violin parts are haunting, like talking in soliloquy. There are also many new sound bits, again just lingering there in the background or gluing fragments together. That's all I'm going to write about the show. You should see it yourself because it is so worth it. I am even thinking of flying somewhere to see it again. After the show, we stayed a bit and met Laurie before "Meet the Artist" part and as always she was very kind and warm. Few autographs and pictures and she had to run to the meeting. Recently some people on this list were talking about recording equipment and possible release of these concerts. At this concert I could also see all that's needed for a good recording. In the handbill it was written that `Happiness" and "The End of the Moon" are part of a trilogy that Laurie works on. I think that similarly to "United States" these new shows will be released as multi disk CD or maybe even DVD. That would be really fantastic! I hope you'll all enjoy the show as much as I did. Greetings Darek PS. If anyone can correct the quote about tears I would really appreciate it!
October 18, 2004 -- Volume 99, Issue 7 Join the Staff | Advertising | About Us | Contact Us Words Resonate Through the Electric Violin Laurie Anderson poetically performs Pillbox | Michelle Bova Any artistic performer?s goal is to make an enormous impact on the audience. To achieve this goal with no props, little background music, and minimal setting to support the performer can seem an almost impossible ordeal. Laurie Anderson, in her performance titled ?The End of the Moon,? reached that goal with her words and shoots them into space with the simple act of picking up her electric violin. Anderson emerged from stage right, dressed in a gray pantsuit that wouldn?t get her a sidelong glance on the street, and took her seat on an imposing armchair, one of the three main objects that dominated the stage. After a moment?s pause Anderson started to tell her first story. Her figure was lit by tiny votive candles and by a small, simple spotlight whose colors cycled from yellow to blue to red repeatedly throughout the performance. Though often her face spoke a deeper meaning of her words, especially during her humorous introductions of pieces, seeing her was utterly superfluous. Anderson captured the audience with her sound. Her initial piece was similar to a short story ? a slow and winding progression through the eyes of someone in a foreign land, asking passersby, ?Where am I?? Anderson controlled the attention and locked the audience members to their seats with her cadence. She had a rhythm with many stops that was abrupt and sometimes very strong. The final pause of this first piece seemed to warrant the continuation of the story, but in place of that continuation, she merely walked over to the center of the stage where her violin hung. When Anderson made music on Wednesday night, she made it with her voice, but she drove her meaning to its limit with her songs. That moment when the first notes arrived from her electric violin was almost unreal. For those unacquainted with this instrument, it makes a powerful sound. It is almost a challenge to believe that the diminutive structure of the electric violin, compared to the smaller structure of a traditional violin, can produce such a noise. Particularly on the opening number, with the long silence after her last words, the electric violin seemed to produce such an enormous resonance that it created a sort of awe. This, and the beauty of the entire piece, was the real crux of how these musical ties made Anderson?s words so charged. The joining of Anderson?s poetry with her song became more pronounced as the performance continued. In a much later piece, she recited a single line, played a few notes, and repeated the process to create a paradox that could be described as very fragmented and yet quite interwoven. But at the beginning, Anderson was at her most wry and witty state of the performance. She even did an impromptu bit by pacing a few steps across the center of the stage and weaving anecdotes from her time as ?the first artist-in-residence at NASA.? Anderson based a large portion of her readings on her work at NASA, using her unique style of poetry, or poetic stories, to convey the sense of what it is like to be the first in anything and to portray some of her observations of various areas of NASA. She spoke a bit about the space shuttle Columbia and about pictures from the Hubble telescope, as well as telling a poignant story about space suits. At this last story, she described the creation of a new form of space suit that was to be with the up and coming: a more form- fitting variety with quite a few features that seemed the stuff of science fiction. Some features included morphine injections in case of injury and a mechanism to increase the strength of the wearer?s arm. After viewing this technological wonder, she said, she was informed by a representative from NASA that in fact, the patent for the suit had been transferred to the Army. A modified version would be traveling not to space, but to the battlefield. Anderson also discussed politics, in her own sometimes sarcastic, sometimes melancholy manner. She talked about September 11 and the war in Iraq. The grace with which she spoke, however, prevented her from becoming preachy. And, of course, there was little to argue with when she lifted the bow and produced, to accompany her carefully crafted words, the pulsing music that simply dropped the jaw. Anderson calmly recited her stories, which are sometimes so abstract they are only comprehensible because she has set them up within the framework of this mystic journey, to the outer reaches of space and the inner workings of her soul. She possesses an uncommon talent for drawing humor into even awkward situations, such as situations where she experienced disappointment with NASA, which described human nature aptly. From the free-flowing humor she used while describing her dog to her passionate description of a relationship being torn apart, each story was cut brilliantly by her wise dialogue. The thing that set her far beyond the boundaries was her music. Not simply the bare product of the music, but how she presented it as a whole, by linking it inextricably to her words. Anderson performed on Wednesday at the Byham Theatre. Her work is well worth experiencing in recorded form. Michelle Bova Staffwriter