From clubs-mail@yahoo-inc.com Fri Aug 31 10:38:25 2001
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 13:46:50 PDT
From: lasherboy20 
To: jimmyd@cc.gatech.edu
Subject: New Laurie Interview!! (Part One) [Yahoo! Clubs: Laurie Anderson
    Club]

This interview is from Interview Magazine.

Ask and you shall receive! Here is the interview Ingrid Sischy has
with Laurie Anderson in the new issue of "Interview" magazine! It's
pretty lengthy, but worth reading. There are some great revelations in
here!! :) It's too long for one single post, so I have to chop it
up.. Enjoy!

"The Secret of her work - Never being afraid to fail" 

Ingrid Sischy: I can't believe I've never asked you this before, but
where are you from and how the hell did you get to New York?

Laurie Anderson: I grew up in a little town outside Chicago. I came to
New York because of live TV. It was the '50s and we'd be watching TV
and everything seemed to come from New York. The newscaster would say:
"This is the news at 7 o'clock" and you'd look at the clock and it was
only 6 o'clock. I'd say "I'm going to New York because it's darker,
it's later, it's more exciting. They seem to know something that we
all don't."

I.S.: And now you're a New Yorker - one, in fact, who was recently
asked to write the Encyclopaedia Britannica section on the city. What
other contemporary artist could claim to have done something like
that? (both laugh) I can just see you walking around New York for
weeks and weeks, discovering all sorts of things. Having watched you
work for a long time, it's clear to me that the freedom to follow
where your insincts take you is very important to you. Was freedom a
big deal to you growing up?

L.A.: Yes. Freedom was a very big thing for me. It had to do with my
bike and being able to go wherever I wanted. I would bike to the
forest or to my fort. I would sit in my fort with my oak-life
cigarette, which burned up in my hand in half a second, like an
exploding cigar, and I would write things down that I thought had
never happened in the world before. I would invent these wild
scenarios. Things like "a boy is walking down the street and a huge
duck comes falling out of the sky and lands on his head just as his
father is chopping a piece of wood." I would write it down just like
that. It seems totally senseless, but for me it was really important
to think of something that had never happened because *I* would make
it happen by writing it down. This was my hobby. And I was somebody
who was always making lists. I had lists of great people.


I.S.: Great people in history? Or great people in your life?

L.A.: Well, we're thinking on a local level. (laughs) They were all
people a grade ahead of meat our school. What I was interested in,
more than anything else, was failure. Because it's easy to
succeed. All of these people around me were succeeding in various
ways, but when they failed, which everyone occasionally does, I would
watch them like a nasty little hawk. (laughs) What did they do with
it? Did they sulk? If they did something with it, nothing impressed me
more than that. I was trying to learn, and these were the people that
I knew I could learn from.

I.S.: Do you think you could make a straight line from that obsession
to your fearlessness with experimentation? Because clearly you're not
afraid to fail.

L.A.: I tried to learn to fail. I tried to think that was not a bad
thing because when I was watching those people, their best stuff had
to do with failure.

I.S.: What's interesting to me is that in the world where we met,
which is the art world, that attitude is intrinsic. Not so in the
larger world, where failure gets no respect. Let's talk about your new
album, "Life on a String", which just came out. One song which
immediately struck me as a great example of your willingness to take a
chance, to go out on a limb and share your deepest, most intimate side
with your audience, whether you fail or succeed, is "Slip Away." It's
about your dad's passing.

L.A.: I was so lucky to be there [when my father died]. Just before
that happened, I was pretty far away from him and my brother said,
"You'd better come as soon as you can," so I did. I was able to spend
his last day with him - he died the night I got there. A friend who
knows a lot about dying had told me the best thing you can do is
synchronize your breathing with the person and then once you've
beenthere for a while, talk a little bit about feeling the energy come
up through your head. I didn't ask her why it was important, but I did
talk to him very softly about that once in a while, when I felt it
wouldn't be intrusive. You don't want to have somebody yapping into
your ear - dying is something you do by yourself.

L.A.: I wanted "Slip Away" to represent a lot of things. It's not a
little thing with harmonium about goodbye. There's a huge amount of
energy and a certain amount of chaos in it. I recorded it with this
guy who plays a single-string Chinese violin, and the song has the
most low-end on the record. It's sort of sub-low-end - you can't even
hear some of it unless you have big sub-woofers. I wanted to do that
to make it a more colorful picture.

I.S.: Good commerce in music spells good old happy songs. You've never
bought into the peppy Pollyanna songs. Have you been tempted?

L.A.: Once I did try to write a vacationing record - "Mister
Heartbreak" it was called. What a name for a vacation record! (laughs)
That's as cheery as I get. (laughs) There were some sad songs on it,
but I wanted it to have many colors and lots of phrases. With the new
album, I was actually pretty suprised by how dark it is. I hadn't
thought that I was in a particularly dark mood when I made it. You
know, I discovered something about my work from a friend who was
working on Moby Dick with me. He said "Who are you talking to when you
do these shows?" And I hadn't realized it until then, but I said, "I'm
talking to myself. I imagine a sadder version of myself sitting in Row
K, and I try to tell her jokes or do something really interesting to
cheer her up." I'd *never* realized that that was somebody I was
talking to.

I.S.: In another song on your new album, "Here With You," it feels
like something else is going on.

L.A.: It's a love song for Lou [Reed] and our dog Lola. Every time I
play it I think of us and I feel like I'm flying. I'm so free. And
somehow they're there with me. It reminds me of when Lou and I play
together, which for me is the purest expression to say how I feel
about him. And Lola, I know it sounds really stupid to say (laughs)
but her absolute purity has taught us a lot about love. It's a love
song for love.

I.S.: What's the main thing that inspires your work? 

L.A.: Running out of time. I might plan ahead and then think, "Wow,
that will take years," and I can see where I'll be dead pretty
clearly. It's not at all impossible. There it is. So you think, "How
can I treasure this? How can I love every single second?" So I try to
look around my world and love it *now*. That idea always makes me
unbelievably happy. I like being aware of the fact that it's an
extremely finite life. I try to think about that a lot, be very aware
of that, and that changes what I want to do. I'll want to do things
that will be helpful. Maybe some little thing that will make someone
say, "Oh. I didn't really see that," and then they get a good
feeling. But at the same time, that idea also nauseates me because
it's like, "Who am I to help somebody or be a do-gooder?" Because once
you want to help people, then you're making something else. You're
making propaganda. You're trying to tinker. What right do you have to
tinker with anybody? Just make something you li!  ke and leave it at
that. But because I owe my life to certain works of art - literally -
that have showed me that life is really worth living, it is so
important to me to keep my desire to contribute something to the world
in the back of my mind when I work. But it's a secret goal.