S/D Laurie Anderson

"do you have a source or can you expand? " Anil Prasad told me that based off conversations and interviews he's done with her.

That kind of attitude is admirable but I wish there were a way to thread the needle between not forcing an artist into Legacy Mode and ensuring their past work is properly archived/made available

As lukas noted upthread, part 2 of the Norton Lectures is now live until 5pm EDT on April 8th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd68fLDyN_4

"It has never been more pertinent": Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s 'Big Science'

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/08/margaret-atwood-laurie-anderson-big-science-o-superman-prophetic-80s-america-pertinent

Free registration now open for lecture 3, 4/14 at 5ET

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lecture-3-rocks-laurie-anderson-spending-the-war-without-you-tickets-148381147005

(the last one she prerecorded her segment, fwiw)

She's programming a day of music today at NTS.

(Link above doesn't seem to work. https://www.nts.live/shows/nts-10-laurie-anderson )

Long, big-picture profile in this Sunday's NY Times.

Laurie in Smithsonian Mag & Hirshhorn---live performances coming later:

AT THE SMITHSONIAN | OCTOBER 25, 2021

The Multiple Arts and Artistries of the Inimitable Laurie Anderson:
A Hirshhorn retrospective opens with ten new works from the pioneering artist, composer, poet and musician

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-multiple-arts-and-artistries-of-the-inimitable-laurie-anderson-180978912/?eml=2021October29/5506248/6011771&etsubid=33248291

Cool, thanks for the heads up! I'll be in DC for Thanksgiving, and hopefully the Metra will be repaired and running regularly by then.

another of her lectures is up for the next 18 hours or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6HsjTeQBQ

the fake scarcity of the lectures is beyond annoying, just put them all up ffs

I do love that at the end of this I'm going to have a new 6-hour Laurie Anderson album on my phone.

the fake scarcity of the lectures is beyond annoying, just put them all up ffs

otm

maybe they will at the end

thanks for the heads up though, on this one! I am watching the 4th one now. every time i listen to her at length i come to think that she is my very favorite artist of all, musical or otherwise. then some time passes and i listen and look at other things and i forget about her a bit. then i come back and am even more sure that she is the greatest

she is a reasonable pick for sure

watched this a few weeks ago, wild stuff in 1977:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfMpZeiKtk

I wish she had recorded more stuff along the lines of "It's Not the Bullet That Kills You (It's the Hole)" in the early days. It's one of my favorite songs of hers, seems like it's been kind of buried under the weight of everything she's done since
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zA6LL78KYU

Strange Angels is mostly sorta like this?

xp that is a great one yes

xp True, especially re: the writing but Strange Angels has that slick high-end 1989 production. I'd like more of a basic amateurish rock band vibe

She might agree with you now about that production: managed to watch all of the fourth Norton Lecture just before it went away, and while she talks enthusiastically about being a "wirehead"--who for instance found a broken machine while poking through the bounteous street trash of old Soho, and yadda yadda her drum suit--demonstrated in her martial arts dance on stage back in the day---a lot of it is also My Life As A Capitalist Tool, beginning in the early 80s, with avant as pop, and the business of being an artist, a creative brand (going with Tim Lawrence's dance culture histories, as NYC comes back from the dead via real estate and related fevers, in the Age of Reagan and Koch and so many more---also her own later experiences, in the context of the process continuing (to Gens Z and Alpha of course, but she doesn't get into "kids taday."
I think somebody upthread mentioned at least one interview where she was pretty tough on herself and her early work---can she why she'd feel "humiliated," as she says here, about the lame 80s video with Peter Gabriel, although it's not all that bad, but she doesn't mention a lot of stuff sadly unavailable (by legit means and in first-gen quality, if at all). But this fourth Norton does include a lot of intriguing excerpts I'd never seen before.
One thing I did miss, which I'd seen in a previous Norton, the one where she mentions her studio with windows on the river etc., was that thing she does so well (on the CD of Life of a Dog; I haven't seen the film), of mentioning or showing something in passing, then coming back to it later from a different angle, incl. what's happened since the first time. I mean, she still does it in terms of intertwining themes, but not imagery or phrases.
(Could have something to do with her praise of haiku as a thing in itself, not like the Western wirehead always be connecting and optimizing analogies and shit.)
Yet she did this after all, implicitly, if you track her back around through a previous work: was struck, near the end of this, about her description of her mother, and how that seemed affected by her breakthrough memory near the end of Life of a Dog--but maybe I shouldn't spoil those.
Also liked that she had Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde and their American tours in there, along with her own.

She poked the trash and found a broken *drum* machine, I meant to say.

Stuff like the lame video now seems "humiliating," I believe she says, rather than feeling "humiliated," like a victim, or maybe she does say the latter, but is candid about being excited at the time, or a lot of the time---though trying to keep up with the changes in her career and the biz and tech etc., frequently having to adjust, like trying to understand and pretending that she did.

Just got back from the Hirshhorn, loved the exhibit!

for those that missed the Norton Lecture (I missed 4 of the 6), it appears that they're re-youtubing them on December 15, like all of them, one by one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LuKgGn5e2g

i really wish they'd just put them on youtube in a normal way, now, though

sorry, i think there were only 5, not 6.

but both of the ones i saw were among Anderson's best work, i thought

Cool, I know what I'm doing next Wednesday

recording the upcoming streams and putting them on vimeo for laurie anderson fans, i hope!

before i updated to the latest version of the MacOS, i had software that could do that easily, but alas

another tragic big sur victim

i had been using the same screen recording warez since like 2014. the recording shortcuts were in my muscle memory. now i have to get out my DSLR to take a photo of the screen, i'm sick of it

can you not get it by looking at inspect element > network and looking for the biggest thing?

i don't know! i'm not sure how youtube's thing with timed countdown events works. if you're a big name artist and you want to schedule a video "premiere", is it actually available beforehand by inspecting element > network?

either way, now that they've aired and served their function as being artificially limited for a while, it would be cool if they just put them up for good

just got this in the ol inbox:

We are pleased to announce that all six of Laurie Anderson's Norton Lectures will be permanently available on the Mahindra Humanities Center website and YouTube channel starting on Wednesday, December 15.

the YouTube stock just soared

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-8pNSolp7I

https://www.rockefellercenter.com/events/philip-glass-and-the-rink-85th-birthday

oh shit thank you for the heads up, copped two tix

the norton lectures are the shit

https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/laurie-anderson-turns-zoom-into-an-art-form-watch-her-hypnotic-harvard-lecture-series-on-poetry-meditation-death-new-york-more.html

I really think these are my favorite thing she’s done in decades, some of that being because they feel so much a summation.

https://www.nonesuch.com/sites/g/files/g2000014771/files/2023-03/laurie-anderson-marc-maron-2023-0320-1200x628.jpg

“It was thrilling to talk to her,” Marc Maron says of Laurie Anderson, his guest on the latest episode of WTF with Marc Maron. “Laurie Anderson had a profound impact on my life. Just hearing her in my headset while I talked to her was kind of mind-blowing.” They talk, among other things, about life in 1970s New York with fellow artists like Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Spalding Gray; playing straight man to Andy Kaufman; and The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, a new book she helped edit of Lou Reed’s writing on tai chi. You can hear their conversation here via Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

love her Andy K stories so much, especially the one about the centrifuge carnival ride

She is one of the few artists I can hear tell the same story (or pieces of the same story, reshuffled) over and over and over again and it never stops sounding fresh.

i mean tbf that's part of her act

i say this with massive love and respect

Yep, I sat through all 5 or 6 hours of Spending the War Without You and would do it again another half dozen times.

the only artist i can think of for whom the "phone book" expression is literally true

She could totally do this---and occasionally mention what a person's name, number, street's name. number, reminded her of. memtion this in passing, and then come back to it later, mentioning how this street looks from that street---reminds me of a Dave Van Ronk song with him saying (not announcing, in the usual way) train stops while playing guitar---via that voice, that guitar.
And speaking of Andy The K, he told about a show which was him reading The Great Gatsby: he was gonna stop when the last person left, but one guy stayed, so Andy had to read the whole thing (aloud).
I think I would have stopped with the vocals, and just stood there, reading silently, maybe with lips moving, or just "reading" and turning pages---but still trapped! That's art.

I could also hear her just doing a straight read, with no adds, like Dave and Andy: that could totally work too.

I was fortunate enough to see her live in 1990, on the "Strange Angels" tour. She is one of the most remarkable performers I have ever seen.

I guess I'm swimming upstream in loving "Strange Angels." Her voice was at its best on that album, imho.

"Landfall," with Kronos Quartet, was interesting.