/
Index /
Laurie Anderson /
The Ugly One
with the Jewels
& Other Stories
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[
Notes
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[
Stories
]
- The End of the World
- The Salesman
- The Night Flight from Houston
- Word of Mouth
- The Soul Is a Bird
- The Ouija Board
- The Ugly One with the Jewels
- The Geographic North Pole
- John Lilly
- The Rotowhirl
- On the Way to Jerusalem
- The Hollywood Strangler
- Maria Teresa Teresa Maria
- Someone Else’s Dream
- White Lily
- The Mysterious “J”
- The Cultural Ambassador
- Same Time Tomorrow
The End of the World
— Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to London Laurie Anderson.
Ooooaaaah!
Ooooaaaah!
Hi. This evening I’ll be reading from a book I just finished and since a lot of it is about the future, I’m going to start more or less on the last page, and tell you about my grandmother. Now she was a Southern Baptist Holy Ruler and she had a very clear idea about the future, and of how the world would end.
— In fire.
In fire.
— Like in Revelations.
Like in Revelations.
And when I was ten my grandmother told me the world would end in a year. So I spent the whole year praying and reading the Bible and alienating all my friends and relatives. And finally the big day came. And absolutely nothing happened. Just another day.
Ooooaaaah!
Now my grandmother was a missionary and she had heard that the largest religion in the world was Buddhism. So she decided to go to Japan to convert Buddhists.
— And to inform them about the end of the world.
And to inform them about the end of the world.
And she didn’t speak Japanese. So she tried to convert them with a combination of hand gestures, sign language and hymns, in English.
Ooooaaaah!
The Japanese had absolutely no idea what she was trying to get at. And when she got back to the United States she was still talking about the end of the world. And I remember the day she died. She was very excited. She was like a small bird perched on the edge of her bed near the window in the hospital. Waiting to die. And she was wearing these pink nightgowns and combing her hair so she’d look pretty for the big moment when Christ came to get her.
Ooooaaaah!
And she wasn’t afraid but then, just at the very last minute something happened that changed everything. Because suddenly, at the very last minute she panicked. After a whole life of praying and predicting the end of the world, she panicked. And she panicked because she couldn’t decide whether or not to wear a hat.
Ooooaaaah!
And so when she died she went into the future in a panic with absolutely no idea of what would be next.
The Salesman
Now the book is called
Stories from the Nerve Bible and what I mean by the Nerve Bible is the body. And parts of the body appear and disappear throughout the book, adding up to a kind of self-portrait although not a very naturalistic one. And I used the word Bible in the title of this book because the first really strange stories I remember hearing were Bible stories. And these stories were completely amazing: about parting oceans, and talking snakes. And people really seemed to believe these stories. And I’m talking about adults. Adults, who mainly just did the most mundane things imaginable: mowing their lawns and throwing potluck parties; they all believed in these wild stories. And they would sit around and discuss them in the most matter-of-fact way. So in a way I was introduced to a special local form of surrealism at an early age and so there was always a question in my mind about what’s actually true and what is just another art form. Now I’ve always been intere!
sted in trying to define what makes up the late twentieth century American for example and so, as an artist, I’ve always thought my main job was to be a spy, to use my eyes and ears, and find some of the answers. For example, I like to hang around the banks of phones in airports, one of my favorite listening posts and eavesdrop on conversations. Now I usually travel on the same schedule as salesmen and after lunch these guys call into the main office and I just stand there at the phones, listening in and taking notes for my portrait of the American salesmen.
— Oh Frank? Listen, Frank. You know, I hate to say this about Brad. I mean we both know he’s got a heck of a job. Ya, ya. Oh you’re so right. But you know, we both know that Brad isn’t pulling his weight. You know what I mean? And I’m not saying this just because we’re both up for the same Safeway account.
So this book is really a collection of voices and stories as well as portraits of people that I’ve met along the way.
The Night Flight from Houston
It was the night flight from Houston. Almost perfect visibility. You could see the lights from all the little Texas towns far below. And I was sitting next to a fifty-year old woman who had never been on a plane before. And her son had sent her a ticket and said:
— Mom, you’ve raised ten kids; it’s time you got on a plane.
And she was sitting in a window seat staring out and she kept talking about the Big Dipper and that Little Dipper and pointing; and suddenly I realized that she thought we were in outer space looking down at the stars. And I said:
— You know, I think those lights down there are the lights from little towns.
Word of Mouth
In 1980, as part of a project called
Word of Mouth, I was invited, along with a living other artists, to go to Panape, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. The idea was that we’d sit around talking for a few days and that the conversations would be made into a talking record.
The first night we were all really jet-lagged but as soon as we sat down the organizers set up all these mikes and switched on thousand white light bulbs. And we tried our best to seem as intelligent as possible. Television had just come to Panape a week before we arrived and there was a strong excitement around the island as people crowded around the few sets. Then the day after we arrived, in a bizarre replay of the first TV show ever broadcast to Panape, prisoners escaped from a jail, broke into the radio station and murdered the DJ. Then they went off on a rampage through the jungle, armed with lawnmower blades. In all, four people were murdered in cold blood. Detectives, flown in from Guam to investigate, swarmed everywhere. At night we stayed around in our cottages, listening out into the jungle.
Finally the local chief decided to hold a ceremony for the murder victims. The artist Marina Brownovich and I went, as representatives of our group to film it. The ceremony was held in a large thatched lean-to and most of the ceremony involved cooking beans in pits and brewing a dark drink from roots. The smell was overwhelming. Dogs ###040225 around barking. And everybody seemed to be having a fairly good time… as funerals go.
After a few hours Marina and I were presented to the chief, who was sitting on a raised platform above the pits. We’d been told we couldn’t turn our backs on the chief at any time or ever be higher than he was. So we scrambled up onto the platform with our film equipment and sort of duck-waddled up backwards to the chief. As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn’t advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, I wasn’t able to inform him that he wasn’t going to get twelve pictures, but only one, very, very complicated one.
After a couple more hours the chief lifted his hand, and there was absolute silence. All the dogs had suddenly stopped barking. We looked around and saw the dogs. All their throats had been simultaneously cut and their bodies, still breathing, pierced with rods, were turning on those pits. The chief insisted we join in the meal but Marina had turned green and I asked if we could just have ours to go. They carefully wrapped the dogs in leaves and we carried their bodies away.
The Soul Is a Bird
In 1984, as part of the press for the tour I was doing in Japan, I was asked to go to Bali and speak about the future with the prince of Ouboud. Now the idea was that I would represent the Western world, the prince the Southern world, and the Japanese press representative would represent whatever was left. The conversations would be published in a large book, scheduled for release one year after the concert tour. Now as press this didn’t really seem like a great way to advertise concerts but it sounded like fun anyway.
And I stayed at the palace in one of the former king’s harem houses. Each of the king’s wives had had her own house guarded by a pair of animals, a bear and a fox for example. By the time I got there, years later, the menagerie had dwindled a bit. My house was guarded by two tropical fish. Bali was extremely hot in the afternoons and the conversations with the prince drifted along randomly from topic to topic. The prince was a bon vivant trained in Paris and he spoke excellent English and when he wasn’t in the palace he was out on the bumpy back roads racing cars. So we talked about cars, a subject I know absolutely nothing about, and I felt that as far as representing the Western world was going, I was failing pretty dismally. Then, on the second night, the prince served an elaborate feast of Balinese dishes. At the end of the meal, the conversation slowed to a halt, and after a few minutes of silence he asked:
— Would you like to see the cremation tapes of my father?
The tapes were several hours long and were a record of the elaborate three-month ceremony shot by the BBC. When the king died the whole country went to work, building an enormous funeral pyre for him. After months of preparation, during which time the corpse continues to reside in the living room, they hoisted the body to the top of this rickety, extremely flammable structure, and lit a match. The delicate tower crumbled almost immediately, and the king’s body fell to the ground with a sickening thud. Suddenly, everyone began to cheer.
Later, I learned that the Balinese believe that the soul is a bird and that when the body falls it shakes the bird loose and gives it a hit start on its way to heaven.
The Ouija Board
In 1978, I spent some time in California in the fall, looking for a quiet place to live. I finally found what seemed to be the perfect apartment. But the night after I moved in I heard a tremendous pounding sound. As it turned out, I had moved in right above a Hawaiian hallow log drum school. Every other night, it was converted into a hula school with a live band of six Hawaiian guitars.
I decided to soundproof my place but I didn’t hang the door very well and all the sounds kept drifting in. About this time, like a lot of New Yorkers who find themselves on the West Coast, I got interested in various aspects of California’s versions of the occult. We would sit around at night when the Santa Anna winds howled outside, and ask questions to the ouija board. I found out a lot of information on my past 9,361 human lives on this planet. My first life was as a raccoon.
— And then you were a cow. And then you were a bird. And then you were a hat, spelled the ouija.
We said “a hat?” We couldn’t figure it out. Finally we guessed that the feathers from the bird had been made into a hat. Is this true?
— Yes, spelled the ouija. Hat counts as half life.
And then?
— Hundreds and hundreds of rave eyes.
Now this is apparently my first life as a woman, which should explain quite a few things. Eventually though, the ouija’s written words seemed to take a kind of personality, a kind of a voice. Finally we began to ask the board if the ouija would be willing to appear to us in some other form.
— Forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it.
The ouija seemed like it was about to crash. Please, please, what can we do ###060318 now so you will show yourself to us in some other manifestation?
— You should lurk. You should L, U, R, K. Lurk.
No, I never really figured out how to lurk in my own place, even though it was only a rented place, but I did find myself looking over my shoulder a lot. And every sound that drifted in seemed to be a version of this phantom voice whispering in a code that I could never crack.
The Ugly One with the Jewels
In 1974, I went to Mexico to visit my brother who was working as an anthropologist with Tsutsil Indians, the last surviving Mayan tribe. And the Tsutsil speak a lovely birdlike language and are quite tiny physically; I towered over them. Mostly, I spent my days following the women around since my brother wasn’t really allowed to do this. We got up at 3am and began to separate the corn into three colors. And we boiled it, ran to the mill and back, and finally started to make the tortillas. Now all the other women’s tortillas were 360°, perfectly toasted, perfectly round; and after a lot of practice mine were still lobe-sided and charred. And when they thought I wasn’t looking they threw them to the dogs.
After breakfast we spent the rest of the day down at the river watching the goats and braiding and unbraiding each other’s hair. So usually there wasn’t that much to report. One day the women decided to braid my hair Tsutsil-style. After they did this I saw my reflection in a puddle. I looked ridiculous but they said, “Before we did this you were ugly, but now maybe you will find a husband.”
I lived within in a yurt, a thatched structure shaped like a cob cake. And there’s a central fireplace ringed by sleeping shelves sort of like a dry beaver down. Now my Tsutsil name was Lausha, which loosely translated means “the ugly one with the jewels”. Now ugly, OK, I was awfully tall by local standards. But what did they mean by the jewels? I didn’t find out what this meant until one night, when I was taking my contact lenses out, and since I’d lost the case I was carefully placing them on the sleeping shelf; suddenly I noticed that everyone was staring at me and I realized that none of the Tsutsil had ever seen glasses, much less contacts, and that these were the jewels, the transparent, perfectly round, jewels that I carefully hid on the shelf at night and then put for safekeeping into my eyes every morning.
So I may have been ugly but so what? I had the jewels.
Full fathom thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But that suffers a sea change
Into something rich and strange
And I alone am left to tell the tale
Call me Ishmael
The Geographic North Pole
The summer of 1974 was brutally hot in New York and I kept thinking about how nice and icy it must be at the North Pole. And then I though, “Wait a second, why not go?” You know, like in cartoons where they hang going to the North Pole on their door knobs and they just take off.
So I spent a couple of weeks preparing for the trip, getting a hatchet, a huge backpack, maps, knives, sleeping bags, lures and a three month supply of Banic, a versatile high-protein paste that can be made into flat bread, biscuits or cereal.
Now I had decided to hitch hike and one day I just walked out onto Austin Street, weighing down seventy pounds of gear, and stuck out my thumb.
— Going North? I asked the driver as I struggled into a station wagon.
After I got out of New York, most of the rides were trucks until I reached the Hudson Bay and began to hitch in small male planes. The pilots were usually guys who’d gone to Canada to avoid the draft or else embittered Vietnam vets who never wanted to go home again. Either way they always wanted to show off a few of their stunts. We’d go swooping along the rivers doing loop do loops and baby ###080152. And they’d drop me off at an airstrip. “There’ll be another plane by here couple of weeks; see ya; good luck.”
I never did make it all the way to the geographic pole; it turned out to be a restricted area and no one was allowed to fly in or even over it. I did get within a few miles of the magnetic pole though. So it wasn’t really that disappointing. I entertained myself in the evenings, cooking or smoking, and watching the blazing light of the huge Canadian sunsets as they turned the lake into fire.
Later I lay on by back, looking up at the Northern lights and imagining there’d been a nuclear holocaust and that I was the only human being left in all of North America and what would I do then.
And then, when these lights went out, I stretched out on the ground, watching the stars as they turned around and their enormous silent ###080318.
I finally decided to turn back because of my hatchet. I’d been chopping some wood and the hatchet flew out of my hand on the upswing. And I did what you should never do when this happens: I looked up to see where it had gone and it came down — fffooo — just missing my head and I thought, “My God! I could be working around here with a hatchet embedded in my skull and I’m ten miles from the airstrip. And nobody in the whole world knows where I am.”
Daddy Daddy, it was just like you said
Now that the living outnumber the dead
Where I come from it’s a long thin thread
Across an ocean. Down a river of red
Now that the living outnumber the dead
Speak my language
John Lilly
Now in this book there are a lot of stories about talking animals: talking snakes, and birds, and fish; and about people who try to communicate with them.
John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank. And the whale kept asking him questions telepathically. And one of the questions the whale kept asking was: do all oceans have walls?
You know, I’ve always thought that one of the most serious defects of the human body was that you couldn’t close your ears. You can’t point them anywhere or close them, they just sort of hang there on the sides of your head. But an acupuncturist explained to me that the pressure points in the ears are very important because the whole body is represented right there in the ear. The ears, he said, are vestigial fetuses, little versions of yourself, one male and one female, and he showed me here’s the lobe, that’s the miniature upside down head, and this curve here is the spine, and right here are the little genitals, and that was when I went back to wearing hats.
The Rotowhirl
Around 1978, I met a comedian, Andy Kaufmann. And he was performing his avant-garde Elise act in a club in Queens. The performance started with Andy playing the bongos, and for some unknown reason, sobbing. We became friends and I acted as Andy’s straight man in clubs and field trips. At the Improv in New York Andy would begin his show by insulting women and saying, “I won’t respect them until one of them comes up here and wrestles me down.” This was supposed to be my job. I sat in the club drinking whiskies trying to get up the nerve. In the meantime I was also supposed to be heckling him. And after three whiskies I managed to get pretty abusive. Wrestling him down though was really hard because Andy really fought. On our field trips we would go to Coney Island to try out some of Andy’s theories on cutting-edge comedy.
We’d stand around the “test your strength” games, the one with the big sledgehammer in the bell, and Andy would make fun of all the guys who were swinging away. And I was supposed to beg him for one of the huge stuffed bunnies. “Oh Andy Honey, please get me a bunny, please, please.” Finally Andy would step up to the big thermometer and take a swing. The indicator would rise a few inches and “Try again, weakling!” would flash. At this point Andy would start yelling that the game was wicked and demanding to see the manager.
We also went at the rotowhirl, the ride that plasters everyone against the walls of a spinning cylinder, and stretches their bodies into Dopplered blobs. Before the ride actually starts, there are a couple of awkward minutes while the attendant checks the motor and the riders, bound head and foot, stare at each other. This was the moment that Andy seized. He would start by looking around in a panick and then he would start to cry. “I don’t wanna be on this ride, I’ve changed my mind; we’re all gonna die.” The other riders would look around self-consciously. Should they help? He would then begin to sob uncontrollably.
I loved Andy. He would come over to my house and read from a novel he was writing; he would read all night. And I don’t know if any of this book was ever even published.
I have never been one that hoped that Elvis is still hanging around somewhere, hiding, but I will probably always expect to see Andy reappear, someday.
On the Way to Jerusalem
There was a devout nun in the XV
th century who decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and she belonged to an order that wore bags over their heads. And the mother superior told the nun that if she walked through the countryside with a bag on her head, she would scare people. But the nun insisted, so the mother superior allowed to her to walk around and around the cloister, every day for three years until she covered the equivalent distance to the Holy City. At the end of her journey the nun was so exhausted that she collapsed. A doctor was called. After examining her he announced that she was too weak to make the return trip. The nun died shortly after.
The Hollywood Strangler
I was living out in West Hollywood when a Hollywood strangler was strangling women. Every night there was a panel discussion on TV about the strangler, speculations about his habits, his motives, his methods. One thing was clear about him: he only strangled women when they were alone, or with other women. And the panel members would always end the show by saying:
Now for all you women, listen: don’t go outside without a man. Don’t walk out to your car, don’t even take the garbage out by yourself; always go with a man.
Then, one of the eyewitnesses identified a policeman as one of the suspects. The next night, the chief of the police was on the panel, and he said:
Now for all you women, whatever happens, do not stop for a police officer, stay in your car. If a police officer tries to stop you, do not stop, keep driving and under no circumstances should you get out of your car.
For a few weeks, half the traffic in LA was doing twice the speed limits.
Maria Teresa Teresa Maria
Last spring, I spent a week in a convent in the Midwest. I’d been invited there to do a series of seminars on language. They’d gotten my name from a list in Washington, from a brochure that described my work as “deals with the spiritual issues of our time”, undoubtedly a blurb I had written myself.
Because of this, and also because men were not allowed to enter the convert, they asked me to come out. The night I arrived, they had a party for me in a nearby town, in a downstairs lounge of a crystal lane’s bowling alley.
The alley was reserved for the nuns, for their Tuesday night tournaments; it was a pizza party. And the lounge was decorated to look like a cave: every surface was covered with that spray-on rock that’s usually used for soundproofing. In this case, it had the opposite effect: it amplified every sound.
Now the nuns were in the middle of their annual tournament playoffs. And we could hear all the bowling balls rolling very slowly down the aisles above us, making the rock club stalactites tremble and resonate.
Finally the pizza arrived, and the mother superior began to bless the food. Now this woman normally had a gruffed low-pitched speaking voice but as soon as she began to pray he voice rose, became pure, bell-like, like a child’s. The prayer went on and on increasing in volume each time a sister got a strike, rising in pitch “Dear Father in Heaven”.
The next day I was scheduled to begin this seminar on language. I’d been very struck by this prayer and I wanted to talk about how women’s voices rise in pitch when they’re asking for things, especially from men. But it was odd. Every time I set a time for the seminar, there was some reason to postpone it: the potatoes had to be dug out, or a busload of old people would appear out of nowhere and have to be shown around.
So I never actually did the seminar. But I spent a lot of time there, walking around the grounds and looking at all the crops, which were all labeled. And there was also a neatly laid-out cemetery, hundreds of identical white crosses in rows, and there were labeled “Maria”, “Teresa”, “Maria Teresa”, “Teresa Maria”, and the only sadder cemetery I saw was last summer in Switzerland. And I was dragged there by a Hermann Hesse fanatic, who had never recovered from reading ###130414, and one hot August morning when the sky was quiet, we made a pilgrimage to the cemetery; we brought a lot of flowers and we finally found his grave. It was marked with a huge fur tree and a mammoth stone that said “Hesse” in huge Helvetica bold letters. It looked more like a marquee than a tombstone. And around the corner was this tiny stone for his wife, Nina, and on it was one word: “Auslander” — foreigner. And this made me so sad and so mad that I was sorry I’d brought the flowers. Anyway, I de!
cided to leave the flowers, along with a mean note, and it read:
Even though you’re not my favorite writer, by long shots, I leave these flowers on your resting spot.
Someone Else’s Dream
You know those nights, when you’re sleeping, and it’s totally dark, and absolutely silent, and you don’t dream, and there’s only blackness, and this is the reason, it’s because on those nights you’ve gone away. On those nights, you’re in someone else’s dream, you’re busy in someone else’s dream.
Some things are just pictures, they’re scenes before your eyes. Don’t look now, I’m right behind you.
White Lily
What Fassbinder film is it? The one-armed man comes into the flower shop and says:
What flower expresses days go by, and they just keep going by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future? Days go by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future.
And the florist says:
White Lily.
The Mysterious “J”
In the book there are several chapters about women talking and women writing. Now it seems likely that men invented writing and wrote what? Maybe ninety, maybe ninety-five percent of everything that’s ever been written. Oh there’s the recent theory that a woman, the mysterious “J”, wrote much of the Old Testament, but only because God was portrayed in this book as patriarchal, tyrannical and inconsistent, the way presumably only a woman would write about a man. But I think I can picture this “J” scribbling away and laughing although the first time I saw the Bible re-enacted was sometime in the 70s and there was a cable TV show in the Midwest and Bible study groups would act out parts of the Bible. But these were pretty low budget productions and shot in a church basement or somebody’s ###160109 and all the prophets had towels wrapped around their heads for turbans, but you could see the tags, the ones with the washing instructions, sort of sticking out and back. There were ver!
y few women on these tapes. They tended to be the odd shepherdess sort dancing girl bit part.
Then last year I was invited to perform in Israel and I was very excited because I wanted to see Jerusalem where this mysterious “J” had spent her life writing and working and the Gulf War had made me even more curious. So I did some asking around, some informal research, and I talked to an Israeli woman who was living in New York and she was really having a hard time living there, and she was always complaining about American men, and she’d say:
— You know, American men are such wimps, I mean, they’re always talking about their feelings.
And I said:
— They are?
And she said she really liked Israeli men because they were so tough and because they all had guns and I said:
— Guns, you like guys with guns?
And she said she did and went on about how terrible it was that Clinton wanted to reduce the army and she was so animate about this that I started to get kind of worried. Yeah, I thought, yeah that’s true, what are all these military people going to do when they lose their jobs? And then I thought, well, hang on, we’ve got all these service industries now, things like psychotherapy, and the military approach to psychotherapy would really be kind of perfect, really efficient and fast, you know, listen, you are nothing, you are a worm, and if you don’t get that mother complex out by 0400 hours you are dead meat.
The Cultural Ambassador
Anyway, I was in Israel as a kind of cultural ambassador and there were lots of press conferences scheduled around the performances. The journalists usually started things off by asking about the avant-garde.
— So, what’s so good about new? they’d ask.
— Well, new is… interesting.
— And what, they would say, is so good about interesting?
— Well, interesting is, you know… it’s… interesting. It’s like… being awake, you know, I’m treading water now.
— And what is so good about being awake? they’d say.
Finally I got the hang of this: never answer a question in Israel, always answer by asking another question. But the Israelis were vey curious about the Gulf War and what Americans had thought about it, and I tried to think of a good question to ask and answer to this, but what was really on my mind was that the week before I had myself been testing explosives in a parking lot in Tel Aviv. Now this happened because I had brought some small stage bombs to Israel as props for this performance and the Israeli promoter was very interested in them. And it turned out that he was on weekend duty on one of the bomb squads, and bombs were also something of a hobby during the week. So I said:
— Look, you know, these bombs are nothing special, just, just a little smoke
And he said:
— Well, we can get much better things for you.
And I said:
— No really, these are fine…
And he said:
— No but it should be big, theatrical. It should make an impression, I mean you really just the right bomb.
And so one morning he arranged to have about fifty small bombs delivered to a parking lot, and since he looked on it as a sort of special surprise favor, I couldn’t really refuse, so we are on this parking lot testing the bombs, and after the first few explosions, I found I was really getting pretty… interested.
They all had very different characteristics: some had fiery orange tails, and made these low paah, paah, paah, popping sound; others exploded mid-air and left long smoky, slinky trails, and he had several of each kind in case I needed to review them all at the end, and I’m thinking:
— Here I am, a citizen of the world’s largest arms supplier, setting off bombs with the world’s second largest arms customer, and I’m having a great time!
So even though the diplomatic part of the trip wasn’t going so well, at least I was getting some instruction in terrorism. And it reminded me of something in a book by Dan ###170256 about how terrorists are the only true artists left, because they’re the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people. And the other thing it reminded me of, were all the attempts during the Gulf War to outwit the terrorists, and I especially remember an interesting list of tips devised by the US embassy in Madrid, and these tips were designed for Americans who found themselves in war-time airports. The idea was not to call ourselves to the attention of the numerous foreign terrorists who were presumably lurking ###170334 all the way to terminal, so the embassy tips were a list of mostly don’ts. Things like: don’t wear a baseball cap; don’t wear a sweat shirt with the name of an American university on it; don’t wear Timberlands with no socks; don’t chew gum; don’t yell “Ethel, our pl!
ane is leaving!”. I mean it’s weird when your entire culture can be summed up in eight giveaway characteristics.
And during the Gulf War I was traveling around Europe with a lot of equipment, and all the airports were full of security guards who would suddenly point to a suitcase and start yelling:
— Whose bag is this? I wanna know right now who owns this bag.
And huge groups of passengers would start #170430 out for the bag, just running around in circles like a Skud missile on its way in, and I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guessed I did seem a little fishy; a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Adam Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren’t some kind of espionage system. So I’ve done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I’d have to keep setting all this stuff up and they’d listen for a while and they’d say:
— So uh, what’s this?
And I’d pull out something like this filter and say:
— Now this is what I’d like to think of as the voice of Authority.
And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say:
— Now, why would you want to talk like that?
And I’d look around at the ###170549 and the undercover agents and the dogs and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Superbowl coverage of the war. And I’d say:
— Take a wild guess.
Finally of course, I got through, with this after all American-made equipment, and the customs agents were all talking about the effectiveness, no the beauty, the elegance, of the American strategy of pinpoint bombing. The high tech surgical approach, which was being reported by CNN as something between grand opera and the Superbowl, like the first reports before the blackout when TV was live and everything was heightened, and it was so… euphoric.
Same Time Tomorrow
You know that little clock, the one on your VCR, the one that’s always blinking twelve noon ’cause you never figured out how to get in there and change it? So it’s always the same time, just the way it came from the factory. Good morning. Good night. Same time tomorrow. We’re in record.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
So here are the questions: is time long or is it wide? And the answers? Sometimes the answers just come in the mail. And one day you get that letter you’ve been waiting for forever. And everything it says is true. And then in the last line it says:
burn this.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
And I what I really want to know is: are things getting better
or are they getting worse?
Stop, stop. Pause, pause. We’re in record.
Because ###180244 stories that we have remembered, and most of them never even get written down. And so when they say things like “We’re gonna do this by the book”, you have to ask “What book?”, because it would make a big difference if it was Dostoyevsky or just, you know, Ivanhoe.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
I remember where I came from; there were burning buildings and a fiery red sea. I remember all my lovers. I remember how they held me.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
East, East. The edge of the world.
West, West. Those who came before me.
We’re in record.
Ooohaaa
Come here little girl. Get into the car. It’s a brand new Cadillac. Bright red.
Come here little girl.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
When my father died we put him in the ground.
When my father died it was like a whole library had burned down.
Stop, stop. Pause, pause.
Ooohaaa
Ooohaaa
Same time tomorrow.
And wild beasts shall rest there
And owls shall answer one another there
And the hairy ones shall dance there
And sirens in the temples of pleasure
Speak my language.
Good night.