Wednesdays With Laurie
Often at this time of year, I write a message about what I’ve been working on, an annual report of sorts. At the end of 2021, a year that was so full and also so empty, when work and home and so many other words lost their meanings, when assumptions, plans, and beliefs all got wiped away like words on a chalkboard or like smoke in the air, I found I had little interest in looking back on what I did. Instead, I found myself thinking about what I had wanted to do and left unfinished. Towards the beginning of the year, I started writing what I hoped would be a series of essays, maybe even a book, about music, or more specifically about our relationship to music, about making music, about living with music, and how those things have changed for me. I called it “Listening Over Time.” Here is an example. By summer, I had a list of topics, a few rough drafts and many notes, but very few finished essays. I was getting frustrated, repeating myself. I started to notice that as the year and the pandemic went on, and as the ways of existing with music that I had known for thirty years - rehearsals, concerts, recording sessions - faded away, I was listening to less music than ever. The basic idea of the essays, listening, was changing. In the moments when I usually would listen to music, I found myself gravitating towards talk, like interview podcasts, or recordings of lectures and zoom meetings by authors and thinkers I was interested in, or silence. As a way of working through this frustration, or leaning into the embrace of words and silence, I started writing a novel. I am almost 300 pages into the first draft now.
Still, I felt the need to write something that would, in some oblique way, share a little bit of my version of 2021. So about ten days ago, as the fall semester wound down, I decided to write an essay about the work of art that moved me the most this year, a series of six talks Laurie Anderson gave as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. Usually, or as we might be tempted to say, in normal years, she would have given these lectures in Harvard’s historic Sanders Theater. This year, Laurie gave them on zoom, on three Wednesdays starting in February and continuing monthly. She took a summer break, then returned for three more Wednesdays in the fall. She gave them a long title, or pair of titles: Virtual Backgrounds, Spending the War Without You, and each had its own subtitle: The River, The Forest, Rocks, The Road, The City, Birds.
Among other things, they consisted of repeated lines and examples from her earlier work, Andy Rooney-like grousing about the limitations of technology, Buddhism, bits using rudimentary deepfake videos of great literary and historical figures like Freud, Gertrude Stein and John Cage, and especially stories - stories about her work: gigs, festivals, recording sessions, conferences, demonstrations, museum shows, and collaborations with famous artists and musicians, as well as animals and machines. Under all of it, music mostly but not entirely by Laurie played unobtrusively, but occasionally rising to the surface. In the accrual of seemingly random ideas and reminiscences, something odd happened. Laurie’s weaving of music, images and words started to feel less like a very successful artist summarizing their career and digressing as the moment dictated, and more like an old friend, a wise elder, guiding us through a difficult time, not by distracting us, but by exemplifying a way of recognizing the beauty of the past and calling attention to the high stakes of our present moment while moving forward into an uncertain future. The war she refers to in the title is never far away.
One of the titles of these pieces is “Virtual Backgrounds.” Laurie didn’t set up her camera in front of a carefully arranged set of shelves, we can’t see into her kitchen or her basement rec room- things that might tell you something about who she is, where she lives, her family, her interests, her qualifications to expound on whatever it is she's talking about. She says she’s in her studio in New York, but we never see it. Her zoom background is a shifting series of images, mostly moving, some still: examples from her work, a recurring shot from what looks like the perspective of a dashboard camera of a car driving through deserted winter streets, illustrations of the ideas or people she’s talking about, like a screen-filling portrait of her husband Lou Reed. Usually she is sitting at what must be a desk, her face slightly low in the frame, leaving space for the backgrounds. Sometimes she gets up, to play electric violin or to talk about one of her VR projects, and reveals that she is in a space large enough that she can manipulate our perception of depth in relation to her digital surroundings. Sometimes she goes behind a green-screened object or just swipes her hand across the screen and makes herself disappear. Sometimes she fades out. Laurie has taken such control over zoom that it has become an expressive tool like an instrument. We have the feeling that she is controlling its changes in real time, that she is the video’s editor as well as its host. She speaks flawlessly, seamlessly, with no sense that this was cobbled together from multiple takes. At the same time she gives the impression that she is managing the video background’s transitions, and possibly also DJ-ing the mostly quiet music behind her. It all fits together with the elegance of a novel or a poem, but it also feels like it was assembled quickly enough to respond to the exact tensions and revelations of the moment it was made, as if Laurie was the entire cast and crew of a nightly newscast covering the metaphysical trends of the day. Instead of the weathermap, Laurie shows us her VR project “Chalkroom,” instead of headlines, she tells stories about stories. Certain sections, like when she read poetry by a natural language machine learning algorithm trained on her writing, or read lines from Philip Glass’s Satyagraha over shaky video of the Occupy protest outside its performance in Lincoln Center, were ecstatically beautiful.
I found out about these talks a few weeks after the first session from my college friend Brett Aristegui, when Harvard’s Mahindra Institute posted a recording of the first talk on YouTube for 24 hours. This was the pattern while they were running. She would give the talk live on zoom - or maybe it was a recording, it was hard to tell - then a few weeks later, Harvard would post them on YouTube, again for 24 hours. When I wasn’t available to watch them, a friend sent me links to glitchy bootleg screen recordings. Their furtive availability, their semi-public state, made the viewing feel time-sensitive, urgent. Recorded or not, they were so engaged with the feeling of living through the moment of their creation that watching them too far away from that date or in too leisurely a way might transform them into historical documents of a world changing so quickly that it was impossible to keep track, even though moment to moment it felt like every day was the same, an inexorable slouch into something terrible with occasional breaks. More than anything else I read, watched or listened to this year, Laurie kept track of that slouch and its breaks in real time, charting its changes and resisting it. Until the last one which went up just a few days ago, I watched each talk multiple times. I listened to them while I took long walks. I spent more time listening to Laurie than I spent listening to people who I consider close friends.
Maybe I should say right now that not only am I not friends with Laurie, I have never been a fan of Laurie. I don’t necessarily mean that I didn’t like her work. I mean that even though I was aware of it - how could I not be? - I had never really listened to it. My first exposure to her work was in the mid-80’s, maybe ‘83 or ‘84. at the Charles River Creative Arts Program, the summer camp where I had many formative experiences like working on Super 8 films, programming analog synthesizers and learning the twelve bar blues (from my current department chair Ken Schaphorst). Campers and counselors put on a show every day at noon - usually singing showtunes, or doing goofy comedy routines, short dance or music performances. One day two slightly older girls with dyed black hair and punk-ish thrift store clothes got on the stage and performed Laurie’s hit “O Superman,” one singing, one playing its one-note ostinato by blowing over a soda bottle. A long-running crush on the singer, Sara Smith, began at that moment. That became the defining performance of “O Superman” for me. I never even bothered to listen to “Big Science,” the album it comes from, until much later, even though, like her contemporaries David Byrne and Philip Glass, Laurie’s records were popular enough to be ubiquitous in the used bins and yard sales I dug through. There was no way someone that popular could also be good, or to use one of Laurie’s favorite words, “interesting.” Was there?
I should also clarify that I am calling her “Laurie” because when I lived in New York, that’s what everyone called her. I say “everyone” because sometimes it seemed like everyone I knew either was working with her or had worked with her, or had sat next to her at a gig, or had run into her at a gallery or a restaurant. She was everywhere. My first run in with her was in the late ‘90’s at a large Passover Seder put on by the Knitting Factory when I was playing with a klezmer band. Laurie held up the show for what felt like an interminable time trying to get her elaborate gear to work then, unsurprisingly, gave a tentative performance shorter than her soundcheck. Not long after that, my friend Skuli Sverrisson became her musical director. Many other musicians I was close to played with her: Jim Black, Dougie Bowne, Eyvind Kang, Guy Klucevsek, Doug Wieselman, just to name a few. There was something about her position as one of the representatives of “our scene” with the most proximity to the world of celebrity and power that made me want to turn away from her, ignore her. When she got together with Lou Reed and sealed their position as king and queen of Downtown, with John Zorn and Hal Willner as their unruly nephews, it seemed like a sign of downtown’s transformation from what I naively thought was a DIY-like ethos where the famous and the unknown were all considered to be somewhat equal on an artistic, if not financial, level, to something more like mainstream celebrity culture, where a few very well-known artists treated everyone else like a pool of possible employees or vehicles for the investment of status-conveying esteem. It was a potentially career-making coup if Lou and/or Laurie hired you or championed you.
One could look at the notorious night in 1997 when Lou and Laurie brought Vaclav Havel and Madeleine Albright, then the sitting United States Secretary of State, to a Zorn gig at the Tribeca Knitting Factory as a symbol of that transformation. Laurie discusses this night and shows a remarkable photo of it in the final talk, so I’ll spare you the details. Though it’s fun to imagine or remember a time when the Knitting Factory was so much Zorn’s domain that not even the Secretary of State could could escape his profane opprobrium if they disrespected him, the idea of people that important occupying the uncomfortable balcony seats usually occupied by Steve Dalchinsky, Yuko Otomo, and Irving and Stephanie Stone is ridiculous on the face of it. Who would bring Madeleine Albright there? I’m tempted to think of it as a sign of gentrification, like when the wealthy parents walk down a Brooklyn street for the first time, realize it’s pretty nice, and decide to write the check for their kid’s condo purchase. Since this was near the end of the Knit’s dominance, it’s also tempting to think of it as a turning point in the arc from Downtown’s late 70’s/early 80’s heyday to its diffuse remnants today.
Of course Laurie is not responsible for celebrity culture’s slow takeover of the Downtown music scene, or what was once called underground or alternative culture, but as one of the scene’s members with the most access to the rich and powerful, the worldwide elites of art and money, as she constantly reminds us in these stories, it’s still hard for me to separate her privileged status from the work she does. Which is what, exactly? What does Laurie Anderson do? Music obviously is a part of it, and so are words, but not exactly lyrics, not exactly plain speech in its own independent rhythm, but also not exactly free verse, not prose, and not rap. As she says, in a digitally pitch-shifted voice in the first lecture, “I’m not a writer, I’m a talker.” Specifically, most of the time, Laurie Anderson talks into microphones.
Now, in the post-Ted Talk era, the podcast era, the zoom meeting era, many of us have spent a lot of time talking into microphones. As the weeks passed by, did you notice any changes in how you spoke into the mic? Did you change your speech’s volume, its dynamics? Or maybe you found yourself using a slightly different rhythm, or cadence, even changing pitch or making small adjustments to your accent? You probably noticed the changes you made in how you groomed yourself, how you dressed, how you sat or stood, how you lit and furnished the area around your camera. I recently watched some recordings of zoom meetings I hosted over the last two years and as I watched them, I noticed those changes in myself and found it a little strange. I was watching myself learn a new kind of work, its techniques, its limitations, its culture and etiquette, its opportunities. I think almost everyone I know shared this experience in some way or another over the last two years. We learned to inhabit an uncanny space where bodies, faces, voices and images converge, interact and glitch, scatter over the world in milliseconds, then remain as recordings in perpetuity. For two years, we’ve been learning to do what Laurie Anderson does.
Over the last ten days, while thinking about writing this essay, I re-watched Laurie’s talks in irregular blocks of time, sometimes early in the morning or late at night, sometimes for just a few minutes, sometimes for a whole talk- a slow, fragmentary binge. As I watched them, I took notes - short phrases or sentences, a paragraph here and there, sometimes about what she was talking about, sometimes about the preconceptions about her I built up over the years being on the periphery of her world, sometimes about that world, or sometimes about the world that we were in when these talks were first posted. In an early talk Laurie asks herself where writing comes from and says, after hemming and hawing a little, “it comes from long nights.” I had quite a few of those long nights this year, writing or not, as I’m sure many of you have had as well. I’m sure there are more long nights to come. I spent some of those nights with Laurie and she helped me understand, or at least be aware of, something about both the time we’re living through and how to live through it. It has a lot to do with work, in the sense of doing actual labor, but also work in the emotional sense, working through something. These pieces required a great deal of virtuosity and plain old labor, working through the pandemic, working over time, even as time stands still, flashes back, or rushes forward. Now, as the winter starts to feel like a new version of the moment when they began in February, we will have to be satisfied with their complete archive on youtube. Yet it feels like the work is not done. Laurie says she struggles with endings, and I think I know why. There’s no way to be done with something that isn’t over, no matter how much we want it to be, or believe it is.