Oof, six weeks? Where did the time go? Well, Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, and all that. Needless to say the holiday season is always a busy one with less time for frivolities like updating blogs, but I've also been in a mood lately where I don't feel like writing down anything.



But I did want to jot down some stuff about the concert Beth and I went to last night, to see Laurie Anderson perform live. I've always liked her stuff since first being introduced to it in Gena's theory class, and I still have the bootleg tape I made at the NU listening center of "United States", her four-LP live album. She's toured off an on through here, but there was always a conflict or whatever, so this time I was determined to finally see her in person, especially so since she just finished a two-year stint as NASA's artist in residence, the first and, as it turns out, only individual to hold that position.



The show was at the Cutler Majestic and was basically sold out. I managed to score tickets on the floor, fifth row center, due to some late returns to the box office that I picked up just this Friday. The concert got off to a rocky start, as the fire alarm went off 30 seconds after she began (maybe the fog machine), and after regrouping half an hour later, she had to stop again a few minutes further along while some sort of fisticuffs broke out behind us somewhere. Never did figure out what was going on there, somebody grabbed the wrong seat on the way back in maybe?



Anyway, after that everything settled down, the show went about 90 minutes with no break. This performance, titled "End of the Moon", features no singing, just her, talking and playing her electronic violin, with a small projector screen set up on one side of the stage and a easy chair on the other. The screen mostly just showed a shot of two craters on the moon that are close enough together and the right shape to suggest a shoe print. Towards the end she attached a small camera on a wire to her violin bow to create a sort of "bow-cam" effect. But that was it for multimedia. In an interview in Sunday's globe she said that in the old days it would take four semis to haul her stuff around from show to show, now it all fits in two suitcases.



The text part of the program was Anderson's signature combination of ruminations, anecdotes, stand-up, personal experience, juxtaposed together to make some associations that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. If it could be said to be about any one thing, it would seem to focus on an ongoing Anderson topic, questioning and deal with humanity's place in the universe and our own individual places within that. In fact, she began with the same "Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?" that begins her "United States".



She talked about receiving the call from NASA out of the blue asking her to be their first artist in residence, so unexpected that she assumed it was a crank and hung up on them. After she was convinced of their sincerity, she asked them what does an artist in residence for NASA do, and they said, "We're not sure, what do you think they should do?" Apparently there wasn't much of a specific charter behind this idea, leaving her free to make up her own agenda, which primarily consisted of visiting most of the NASA sites (JPL, Houston, Ames, Hubble, etc.). The NASA web site only mentions her once, in an internal newsletter from towards the beginning of her tenure. She said the only thing she wanted to do and didn't get to was ride the "Vomit Comet", the airplane the astronauts use to train for weightlessness. She had decided to come up with some sort of final report to present at the end of her tenure, but while she was putting it together she found out NASA was discontinuing the artist in residence program, after which, she said, her report changed dramatically.



Since the beginning of her residence coincided with the Columbia disaster, there wasn't any opportunity to see a shuttle launch. She talked about the pieces of the shuttle falling over such a huge area, and how they were able to collect them all and reassemble what they had into a ghost of a shuttle. She did visit Baltimore where the Hubble team was showing off some new spectacular photographs of distant galaxies. When she asked about whether those were the real colors depicted in the photographs, they admitted they were colors they picked because they thought people would like them. Her reaction was one of surprise, "I thought >I< was the artist in residence", she said. She talked with people at JPL about projects for terraforming Mars to make it inhabitable by humans, projects expected to last 10,000 years, and the pointlessness of sending humans into deep space because of the law that each generation of rockets will be so much faster than the last that they would pass up any spaceships already sent towards the stars before they even got very far.



She also visited Ames labs, where they were demonstrating the latest technology in spacesuits, which were made to be much more form-fitting than the classic moon mission suits, and could enhance the wearers strength, tighten into a splint if they suffered a fracture, and inject any type of stimulant or painkiller without having to open it up. Since the application for this type of suit in space was untold years away, she said, the technology had since been co-opted by the military, in order to make protective suits for soldiers in the desert.



Her best anecdote probably had to do with a hiking trip she went on out west with her dog, Lolabelle, who suffered a near-death experience when a vulture mistook her for a rabbit and, once realizing its mistake, hovered over her for a while trying to figure out whether to attack him or not anyway. The bird eventually left, but for the rest of the trip, the dog no longer kept its nose to the ground, sniffing around for different things, but instead kept looking at the sky in an awkward way, as if this was a new dimension she had never noticed before, now aware that the same thing could happen again. Anderson connected that to the way her neighbors in New York looked in the weeks following 9/11, after, she said, they had realized two things: 1) they could attack us from the air, and 2) it would be this way from now on.



Aanother theme she touched on in her performance dealt with the nature of time, how dark energy would eventually convert all matter into a state of timelessness much like what existed before the big bang, and how she wished the period at the end of every sentence could be a small clock, indicating how long it took to write that sentence. The moon of the title only got a mention in relation to the moons of Mars, which said are the Greek words for "fear" and "panic", obviously something you would name someone else's moons and not your own, and an anecdote about how Robert McNamara had once suggested setting off nuclear bombs on the far side of the moon, and her reaction was "Can they just do that? Shouldn't we all get to vote on something like that?" She also talked about the nature of beauty, what does it mean anyway, how our moon was historically associated with beauty, that things looked more beautiful by moonlight and that the moon itself was beautiful.



What Anderson didn't really say, although I think it fits in with her observations, is how technology allowed us to get closer up to these things that have mystified humanity for centuries, and it turns out they're not nearly as interesting as we would have hoped. The moon was just a barren rock, Mars even moreso, and those planets and moons shrouded in clouds like Venus and Titan don't have anything exotic lying beneath their surfaces either. Even NASA scientists are touching up pictures of outer space to make them look more appealling to the general public. The need to explore still exists, and there are plenty of questions exploration can still help answer about how we got where we are, but the practical benefits, or even whizbang visual attraction we expected, just aren't there. Anderson did mention the first astronauts, all test pilots and not poets or writers, who couldn't come up with much verbiage to describe their experiences other than "the earth sure seems small from up there" and that sort of thing, and I think that's not really their fault because they didn't have a great deal of sensory input to work with.



The violin riffs and melodies in the program captured that signature sound, interesting to watch live to try to figure out how she can be playing one note at a time but have all these other things happening as accompaniment. It was a good show, and from a musical standpoint I'd be hard-pressed to think of another artist who would qualify for artist in residence if NASA had continued the program. A writer or painter could give you their take on the same experience, but its the blending and distillation of all these different media that Anderson does so well, and this fits right in to her general worldview anyway. Hope there's a CD forthcoming (ideally without the fire alarm or the fist fight).