Everything about Laurie Anderson is interesting. Where do you want me to start?

Anxiety said:

How about here:

Who the hell is she?

How about here:

Who the hell is she?

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago in 1947. One of eight children, she studied the violin and, while growing up, played in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard College in New York, and went on to study at Columbia University, working toward a graduate degree in sculpture. The art scene of the early 1970s fostered an experimental attitude among many young artists in downtown New York that attracted Anderson, and some of her earliest performances as a young artist took place on the street or in informal art spaces. In the most memorable of these, she stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended. Since that time, Anderson has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media - music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture - in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York, as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Bros., including Big Science, featuring the song "O Superman," which rose to number two on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick," an interpretation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel. She lives in New York.

That picture is sofa king cute.

oh god, in my next life, let me be reborn as Laurie Anderson.

She's one of my favorites. This weekend, my friend who kinda knows her said he was going to pass on a CD of my silly band's cover of "Ramon," one of my most favorite songs ever. He chickened out, which I understand (and which I think I might be grateful for).

She is very small.
She cuddles with Lou Reed.
She loves Amsterdam.

a few years ago, she worked for six weeks as a cashier at a mcdonalds in lower manhattan. she said in an interview that very few people recognized her.

Anxiety said:

Did she give any reason WHY she did that?

HamsterHuey said:

Because she's Laurie Anderson and she gets off on doing crazy shit.

Seriously, I don't know how to phrase this accurately or gracefully, but I think it was a Buddhist exercise in humility, and also I remember her saying that she wanted to experience how the public treats people in customer service positions like that.

I'll have to see if I can find info about this online - it just made me love her all the more. Can you imagine Prince trying something like this?

IMAGINE YOU'VE DUCKED into Mickey D's for a quick McHeartAttack to go. You're so caught up in the glory of the everyday value menu that you don't notice anything strange at first, but slowly it dawns on you that the voice asking you if you want to "supersize that" is vaguely familiar. Oh yeah, of course, it's ... Laurie Anderson?

Yes, she loves to see you smile. But no, Lou Reed is not in the back working the fry pit. And no, you haven't walked into some kind of bizarre performance art piece.

Or have you? After all, working on a McDonald's crew last year was part of the research Anderson did for her latest solo show, Happiness, which UCSC Arts & Lectures presents this weekend. The title may seem ironic in connection with such minimum-wage, burger-a-thon circumstances, but for Anderson her time under the golden arches was another eye-opening moment in her quest to take a good, hard look at the world from other perspectives.

"It's such a cliché that it's, like, 'a happy place' ... but it actually was," she says. "It was a shock. I had a great time working there. We definitely were very proud of what we were doing, and it wasn't this dreadful thing that I'd been expecting. I went in with, I guess, this kind of snotty intellectual thing to see how mass production works. How do you make stuff that everybody likes--CDs, hamburgers--how does it work? And it was just too intellectual a question, because it really was about how we worked together and how we felt about it."

Other research trips for the project included a stint on an Amish farm and a two-week canoe trip with Buddhists. Just when it seemed that Happiness was on track, however, a nasty shock arrived: Sept. 11. The terrorist attacks left Anderson reeling. The planes that hit the World Trade Center not only struck at the heart of the city she has called home for 35 years but flew over the very street where she lives, 10 blocks from ground zero.

"It really changed me a lot. It really hit me very, very hard in a lot of ways that I actually really appreciate now. It was like waking up," she says. "Plus, it was this sensation of really living just for a while in the absolute present. Not really knowing what was going to happen. And also appreciating how incredibly beautiful all these places were--we were traveling through a lot of cities in the United States, and each one seemed more beautiful than the last one."

Thanks for the link!

Prince seems to be putting his faith in higher forces, Laurie gets down on her knees and searches for the source of humanity. I like that.

HamsterHuey said:

it blows my mind to think that someone has gone to mcdonald's and had their order taken by a woman who's collaborated with peter gabriel and william s. burroughs.

Mo is no avant-garde intellectual - she had to work.

FunkMistress said:

she did a song about Superman.

...working on a McDonald's crew last year was part of the research Anderson did for her latest solo show, Happiness...

Other research trips for the project included a stint on an Amish farm and a two-week canoe trip with Buddhists.

Oh, if only I could be Laurie Anderson and work at MacDonalds as an experiment.

but no, I have to work crap jobs just to make money

Where's the glamour?

heartbeatocean said:

you can always pretend you're laurie anderson and when a co-worker gets on your nerves, you can always remind them, "i'm merely at this position to collect research for my performance art, you know."

they'll think you're crazy, but you might get an arts grant.

"I'm just doing research" is my new mantra.

MendesCity said:

awww, i bet she would appreciate it. i've never met her, but i've had some close encounters with her and she comes off as really friendly. of course, the times i had close encounters with her, i was scared to say hello to her because i'm such a fan, i was afraid i'd act like laverne & shirley and make a starstruck ass out of myself.

Anxiety said:

Totally. I did sell her Twizzlers once when I worked a movie theater, and I think I just stared like a crazy person. Unfortunately, it got ugly when one of the born-again ushers asked Lou Reed to come speak at his church, and Lou Reed went off on him and asked for the manager. It was weird on so many levels.