Surfin' the Net with Dr. Bartlemania
(from The Music Press, Binghamton, NY, August 1995)
This month's site:
Homepage of the Brave (Laurie Anderson)
URL: - http://www.c3.lanl.gov:8077/cgi/jimmyd/quoter?home
If people like Senator Exon would spend their time checking out really interesting places on the World Wide Web instead of whining about the very few sites that contain objectionable material (which of course depends on what you consider objectionable) we'd all be in better shape. It just so happens that there are many rather entertaining web sites dealing with things like art, food, sci-fi, politics, and of course music. I accessed this one on a Power Macintosh equipped with Netscape version 1.0N. I remember when avant-garde poetess, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson's early single O Superman, on the New York indie label One-Ten Records, arrived at WHRW in 1981. It got fairly heavy rotation as I recall. While some in the music media declared her officially career-dead in the mid-80's, that was never the case. She is still at it, still on a major label (Warner Brothers), has a new CD out (Bright Red) and is now on the web in at least two places. One site is operated by a commercial media outfit called Voyager. It contains info about her new interactive CD-ROM Puppet Motel (as well as sound bites, and moving and still-picture samples from it) and facts about her recently-concluded Nerve Bible concert tour, including personal diaries from each of the many venues (Birmingham, England - ``This is by far, let's say, the most undemonstrative audience so far...I kept having the sensation that everyone had slipped silently out the side doors...''). You can also send Laurie e-mail. Homepage of the Brave, whose URL (net address) appears above, is run by Laurie Anderson fan Jim Davies whose day job is doing artificial intelligence research for Uncle Sam at the Los Alamos (New Mexico) National Labs (hobbies: artificial intelligence, comedy improv, cartooning and of course, Laurie Anderson's work. How do I know? Like the commercial says, it's in there!). Being a cyber-fan club and a labor of love, this web page has much more neat stuff to explore than the mainly promotional Voyager page. When the page first appears on your screen, underneath a straightforward click-to-pick-subject menu is a colorful, fascinating and complex ``map''. Clicking your mouse on any of the images in it can transport you to other web sites dealing with Tibet, psychological panic and anxiety disorders, her Voyager site described above, or to the ``other'' Homepage of the Brave, which instead of the cryptic map, features a menu and a different photo of Laurie every time you call it up. Did I mention that both pages toss out a randomly-selected Laurie quote at the bottom of your screen? Other goodies are a neat discography (Laurie's first single: It's Not The Bullet That Kills You, It's The Hole, 1977, label: Holly Solomon Gallery, NYC), a list of stuff she wrote (she did a lot of magazine articles for Art News and Artforum between 1971 and '75). And although those articles aren't found here, there are downloadable texts, like a termpaper some college student did about Anderson's work, or the article Laurie wrote about the surrealistic theme park she wants to build in Barcelona, Spain with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno! There's a listing of films and videos she did between 1974 and now, indicating which ones are available (and giving the number of Facets Video [1-800-331-6197] in case your local family-values video shop doesn't have them - Video Den, where are you when we need you?). Lastly, Homepage of the Brave includes two staples of every web site, the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions, e.g. ``What's the song that goes `Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah,ah,ah...''. Answer: O Superman), and Laurie's ``hotlist'' (a directory of clickable web addresses) of other interesting sites. Laurie's faves include Le Web Louvre in France, a politically-conservative site called the Right Side of the Web (I think she included it for our edification, not because those are her beliefs), the web site of the political satire group The Capitol Steps, IUMA (The Internet Underground Music Archive), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a site which teaches how to create ``tree fiction'' (you read the first paragraph, then click on a number of options to get to the next one. The options you select determine the progress of the story). I have seen the future of fan clubs, and it's on web sites like Homepage of the Brave.
Other innarestin' sites I've found: I Need My Chocolate - http://www.qrc.com/~sholubek/choco/start.htm
IUMA - Internet Underground Music Archive. See album covers from and hear music by cool bands even WHRW doesn't spin yet. (MPEG or Sun .AU playback software and stereo sound card required for maximum enjoyment). http://www.iuma.com
The USENET newsgroup rec.photo.darkroom. Discuss your favorite processes or post questions to this newsgroup. Participants include beginners, experienced pros, and everyone in between.
Oh yes, don't forget to write, call or e-mail your congressman and senator and tell them HANDS OFF THE INTERNET! As Jello Biafra reminds us, what's really at stake here is access to information itself!
(Copyright '95 PMG. All rights reserved.)