Laurie Anderson - Live at Tribeca Festival

33:44Oh, yeah, exactly. Anything but the beads and the macrame. Oh, my God. Terrible. Well, basically, oh. You know, I actually have a really, I should have brought this. It's a boiled hat. It's made by someone here in New York. She makes these hats. They start out the size of lampshades, and she triple boils them until they're like felt or something, but thicker, thicker, like half an inch thick. And then I have, I got one from her that's shaped like a kind of paper boat. Very thick and violet. And I like to wear it with these medals on it. And I have like to hang out one medal, which is a lifetime membership of Harley Davidson's motorcycles.

34:47motorcycles, not a medal I deserve, but I happen to inherit this medal, so I wear that one on the other side, a medal from a junior high school orchestra, and it looks sort of like, you know, kind of cool. And I was recently coming to TSA and had sort of a military sort of coat on also and some dark glasses. And so TSA officials see me and go, thank you for your service. And I was like, what branch of the military gives their retired officers boiled lavender hats? You know, the Navy maybe, you know, some branch I didn't know about. And anyway, I thought, you know, he's just standing there. And I know you're supposed to release, you know, if somebody's doing that.

35:53And so I was like, I don't know how to salute. Brownies was a two-finger thing. And then, so I thought I should just say, you're welcome. Because I have done my service for my country in my own way, you know. I have done service. That's fantastic. But anyway, finally I just did a very lame version of it. Like, oh, you're welcome, you know. Like, oh, thank you, my good man. You may go, you know. It was awkward.

36:36But ice is awkward. I mean, these guys really, they don't know what they're supposed to do. And they're not trained to do it. So they're just, it's a really interesting confrontation now because nobody really knows how to act or what role they're supposed to be playing in this ridiculous play. because your love story with Lou Reed was famous and his love for you made him seem more lovable too and after his death you made a Lou Reed chatbot and so you can continue to talk to him and I wondered what are your favorite subjects and do you ever ask him what you should wear? Yeah, he's got really great opinions on that You know, we never talked about that in terms of what I was doing, what I would wear.

37:41But he was very interested in clothes and really had just wonderful taste, just wonderful taste and really unusual. And he liked sort of a, and it's interesting when you're selecting clothes, you know, if you're with somebody who's saying, you should really try that. And you have your own thing, but I have a friend who's, she's very blunt, let's say. And so if I was saying, once I was just saying, you know, I feel so horrible. I feel like such a stupid failure and I feel awful. I'm so depressed. And she said, well, yeah, you look like shit. And I said, okay. She said, let's go get you some clothes.

38:53And I was like, I'm not into shopping therapy. I'm not going to go and feel better because I have better clothes. And she said, come on, let's go. So we went and she picked these things out. And it was preposterous. And she would say, try that. I said, I would never wear that. And she said, just try it. I put it on and go, that looks great. You know, she was always right. So some people really have a knack for this, and they can see what other people should do too. They have this vision, and that is really amazing. So when you see designers who have this idea like, oh, people would look really good in that, then it's really a skill that's amazing.

39:45And I know you have that because I have my favorite sweater ever was made by you. Black sweater was a picture of a line drawing of a dog, and it's just the most perfect item of clothing. so I think you have this idea of how what would look really interesting and beautiful on people how do you get that vision? I have a real knack for that it's, I think it's I love going shopping with people and somehow I become more daring when I'm encouraging them like your friend try it on and I don't really know if it's going to work but I have a hunch and then it often does and I especially like going shopping with men I like taking men shopping because they're like oh I can't be bothered or you know I've got these things from a catalog and then I say like let's go to Margiela.

40:58And when something happens, when they put these things on, and they just become, it's like in the Odyssey when they sprinkle the fairy dust on Odysseus to make him not look like a wreck when he's just come out of the sea and he suddenly becomes all dazzling. And I think, yeah, I love doing that. And I remember giving you that jumper because I'd come to see your film about the concert for dogs.

41:34And you have a special sort of your love of dogs is legendary as well. And you've put on, you did the concert for dogs and you taught your dog Lola Bell, who's now departed, how to play the piano and paint pictures. And your love of animals doesn't seem to replace your love of people, more to play with other dimensions of expressing love and imagination. And how do you communicate with the animals? Because I think there was one moment where you were figuring out how to talk to dogs. well I never wanted a piano playing dog or a painting dog I never thought that's almost grotesque but what happened was Lola Bell went blind and she was a super social dog was just loved people and vision was very important because she would see them and she'd, yes!

42:48You know, she was just in love with people. And so when she went blind, all of that was gone and she just froze. She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't, you'd have to pick her up to go, to take her out to pee and you'd have to put her next to her bowl to drink and give her that, and she just lost it. And so lost everything, all her joy. And so I didn't teach her this, but her trainer, Elizabeth, said, well, I could teach Lola to play the piano. And I was like, why? You know, she said, well, let's just try it. So she did teach her, and she got pretty good, fairly good, you know. We put out a Christmas record of hers, and she was mostly doing some of the programs that I use.

43:57They were very easy. You just kind of sample stuff and like that, and then it goes, da-da-da-da-da-da. You're just going like that. And she also learned how to turn all of this stuff on. So when she started doing that, people would come around and, Lola Bell, you're so stupid. And she was like, they see me. And she started playing. So she would do a concert every day around noon, and people in the studio would just come around, Lola Bell. And she would play for an hour, you know, and she did benefits also.

44:44She made these kind of sculpture things. It was ridiculous, you know. But, you know, to see an animal just get so tight and sad and then just go, you know, music saved her life. I would say that about a lot of human musicians, too. You know, you just play and it's beautiful. You know, so people are coming, oh, let's listen to that or I'll play it. So she got her social life back. And so, yeah, it really was so much fun. And I think dogs like music quite a lot. A lot of them, some of them just can't stand it. But it's too much for some of them.

45:49Yeah, so doing music. I also did some things with some chimps. There's a group called Save the Chimps in Florida, and they sent me some paintings that were done by the chimps and said, could you collaborate with them and just make more marks on these? I was like, these paintings are done. You don't need me to just do that on top of it. And I said, who are you people? And so I went down to Florida, and they have all of these chimps that live on different islands. And chimps can't swim. They sink so that the islands are their prisons in a way. But these chimps were brought from Arizona, where they had all lived alone in cages.

46:43They were NASA chimps. And so this guy from New York went and he got a bunch of buses tricked out with windows and beds. He bought all the chimps. He put them on the buses. These had never been out of their cages. Put them on the buses and drove them slowly across the country to Florida. And he put them on these islands. And they invented their own social structure. So they had not had any contact with other chimps. So they went into small groups of like, okay, you be the mom and I'll be the kid. Or I'll be the old guy with the cigar and I'll be your curious nephew. And we'll hold hands and walk around.

47:33And you're like, how do they even think about how to do this? Amazing. And so then there's a lot of, some of them were very violent, and they were put in another place while they made this transition from being medical subjects to free animals. I mean, some of them didn't make that, but a lot of them were doing displays, and they were, the first time I went there, and I went there several times. they would just I heard this you know there's all these chimps who were banging on their cages making the most cool rhythms and I was like can I come and record this or play music with these chimps and they said yeah and so I went down a few times and recorded with them and that was really amazing because I would I brought a violin and different instruments and I would play some.

48:45And then Arthur the Chimp, my favorite one, would go. I was like. And so the people who were taking care of the chimps, they said, we didn't know the chimps sang. I said, did you ever sing to them? They said, no. And it was magic. It was really, it was some kind of like, I never felt like this with an animal. I never really, it's like suddenly you're singing with a bird. That did happen to me once. I'm just talking too much.

49:33Reassociating. I don't even know if people are here anymore. I hear them, but I just... Have you ever made any work to do with psychoanalysis? I did make something. It was in the Holly Solomon Gallery, and it was a little clay figure that was on the floor and film was projected onto it. It was me telling a story because, you know, in art museums, they're about seeing a big painting or a big sculpture and you go, wow. And if you have to have something that's a little more involved with narratives or something, it's not the right place. Because the way you move through a museum, you know, or let's say you're at a biennial or something, you see all these great works.

50:36And then suddenly, the video room. And it's like, oh, there's seven works in there and they're each 45 minutes long. And the projection's really bad. The sound's really bad. The seats are really uncomfortable. You're like, I don't know the wrong, you're doing the wrong thing. And so I thought, how am I going to put a story in a museum? So I thought, if you have, you scale, you scale. And so this was a really little, it's in the Guggenheim collection. It's a really little person. And it's called At the Shrinks. And it's a story and it goes like this. I spent some time seeing a psychiatrist and I would get her to her office really early in the morning.

51:18So this little squeaky figure is telling you the story. So you have to lean down and go, what? And so I'd get to her office early in the morning. She was always sitting in the same corner. And on one side of her was a window and the other was a mirror. And I could tell by the direction of her eyes whether she was looking out the window or at the mirror. And she looked at the mirror a lot. and I noticed that on Monday the mirror was perfectly clean and clear, and Friday it was covered with these lip marks. And this was a process that, you know, one of these things that you just kind of, at first you're like, what's that?

51:58And then you just get used to it, and pretty soon you're dependent on it, you know. And where are the lip marks? And so one day in passing sort of I said, I was talking about things like that happened like that. And I said, it's like the lip marks that appear on your mirror. She said, what lip marks? And I realized because of the way the sun was coming in through the window at an angle and hitting the mirror, that they were invisible from her point of view. So I said, why don't you come over and sit in my chair because you can see them from here. And now I had never seen her get up. So she actually, she got up.

52:47She could actually walk, you know. I was like, can you walk? She said, yes, I can walk. And she got up and she sat in my chair. And she said, oh, lip marks. I was like, yeah. And I realized that we were seeing things from such literally, literally different points of view that I would never have to see her again. Oh, because what she discovered, what she discovered, if I have to say that, was that she discovered that her daughter had been coming into the office and kissing the mirror. And that the maid would come in on the weekends and wash it off. And so I was like, okay, we've got really different points of view here.

53:35Just about everything. So anyway, so one of the things that you had mentioned that we could try to do is switching places. Do you want to try that? Definitely. I'd love to. I'm going to put it this way.

54:02Oh, that's what that looks like? Wow, that's strange.

54:10So, does it feel strange to be the Annalisande, or whatever they're called? It's really relaxing. Yeah, right? Yeah. Feels nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mustn't look at you. I know my role is supposed to be like don't say anything, isn't it? No, none of that Freudian stuff. We've got to talk. I always talk to my analyst. And I love being able to say anything. I often have dreams about my analyst, like I'm in bed with him a lot of the time. And sometimes his wife is there kind of looking at me. Wow. And I tell him all these dreams. The three of you are there? Once the three of us were there. I mean, nothing was really happening, but I always tell him these dreams, and every now and then I'm like, yeah, I had another one of those dreams, and he kind of smiles wryly.

55:15Well, it is horrifying when people start telling you their dreams. It is the worst thing. You know, because it's just the same thing. This uncle, no, no, wait, it wasn't my uncle. No, it was my uncle. And he's walking down the road. No, it wasn't a road. It was kind of a path. And you're like, oh, please don't tell me your dreams. Oh, you are not a filmmaker, you know. And it's fragment. Although I suppose that stories are like that. Do you have dreams that are real stories? or are they just like kind of broken up things and people and bits of stuff that's knitted together? Or do they have, are they going somewhere?

56:10I had a recurring dream when I was a child, when I was about eight. And I was in a train carriage and sitting opposite a giant. and in the other carriage it was filled to the ceiling with pins and he said, you've got to move all those pins from one carriage to another or else. And I had to do it in three seconds and I realised the three seconds was kind of up and I had that dream again and again for about two years. What kind of pins? Yeah, they were just not safety pins, pointy pins. And they were stuck in something and then you had to pull them all out? The other carriage was filled like a kind of Duchamp installation or something, filled with these pins, and obviously it was really hard to touch them.

57:16And it was pointless, no pun intended. Yeah.

57:24Maybe that was it. It was about pointlessness. Pointlessness of misery.

57:34I'm trying not to say anything. I don't know if that's... But you did say that you had a rapport, a conversational rapport with your analyst. Yeah. I went to see this man who, about two or three years before my father died, and I wanted, I said to him, I need to prepare for his death because he was ill and old. And I don't want to fall to pieces when he dies. I don't, because his presence in my life had been such a life force and such a driver and all the things I'd gone through and this kind of ongoing feeling of hopelessness that sort of dogged my whole life. And he was the North Star. Somehow I never wanted to opt out because of him.

58:40and so I went to this analyst and told him that and I have been going back ever since and then when my father did die, I had this hunch that it was like his death was his parting gift to me and I was able to be less concerned about opinion because his opinion mattered so much that it kind of held me back, even though I was, you know, still did a lot. He was always in the background, even if I didn't really realize it. And I've carried on seeing him ever since then, and he's wonderful. So it's the kind of, after his death, he was still a North Star, right? Yeah. Yeah, so those things don't change.

59:41I mean, that's why they call it the North Star. It's fixed. Yeah. And you can, I have a few of those too. And they're people. And they are constellations that I navigate with. And it's very important to me. I don't think I could make it through days without having this orientation. Do you have more than one of those people, or is this the main one that you navigate with? He's the main one, and my son as well. I have a son, and it's a different type of North Star, but I have to go beyond my sort of tentativeness to be by his side. So it kind of gives me a, I find I'm able to come up with things I didn't know I was capable of.

1:00:44That's so great. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. I think other people are the ones that, I mean, ideas are great, but the stars are people. Yeah. And that you know also. and that have showed you something. You know, that's... That's so true. Yeah, that's really true. Yeah, then there are sort of new people who... I used to have this obsession with best friends, and then I suppose I change, so I do have a best friend too, And she was almost like a mentor to me. And gradually, as we've got older together, we've become this kind of source of optimism. But it's changed from us trying to cheer each other up and fit sort of to just accept.

1:01:56I sound so corny, but she's gone through a lot of hardship, and I've stopped trying to come up with great solutions, and I just feel so some other thing has come into it that I can just be her friend. And she talks about this thing called the beauty alongside, and she's a Russo scholar and she's like someone from, she's just so heroic. And so my friendship with her feels like the beauty alongside. And I find when I feel tormented by kind of awful, you know, terrible things, cruelty in the world, I think about our friendship and it takes me through that portal and I can bear to have both feelings or I can bear the sadness doesn't take me to the bottom of the river and her friendship is this wonderful kind of, it is a North Star, her friendship remembering it's possible to not indulge the sadness of life.

1:03:19Well, that's a really, I'm just watching your hands while you're describing this too, and it really does seem like you're kind of like a juggling thing because, and I'm just thinking of that. But who was it? F. Scott Fitzgerald, maybe, who said, you know, that this is the ability to, what he's aspiring to is the ability to hold two imposing things. Right. And they would both be equally true. Yeah. And you would not go crazy. Yeah. And I feel that that's a wonderful skill. Because things are not easily wrapped up into like, oh, that's all mostly good or mostly bad. They're mixed and they're complicated.

1:04:08And it's you who put them together and somehow sometimes in dreams or in your way, like you're saying, the way you navigate and how you give meaning to your life. by watching other people balance those things too. It's very restoring. It really is. Yeah, I'm really glad you're saying that because I was thinking this was going to go a different direction, but it's going in a really nice direction because it really is, it's so hard to live in this world. And so sometimes people go into their dream worlds a little too far. And just because it's so horrible. And also some of what's happening seems so unreal, so dreamlike.

1:05:15For me, I think it was a fight cage on the front lawn of that White House. That's a dream that is so weird. Yeah. It's so, I mean, if somebody would tell you that they had that dream, you'd go, that's, you're an ill person. This is really, they're not going to do that. They're doing that. It's going to be ready for a couple of weeks or whenever. I don't know. So I think dreams can be very disconcerting when the real world starts acting wobbly like that. Yeah. And you kind of go, what is real here? How could this be going so far off the rails? This is like wild. Do you get that feeling? Yeah. That's why I feel making things is so important because it's real.

1:06:14And then you can shape beauty and be generous with it. You know, like taking someone shopping even. It's something caring and it's about... It's just... I find when I feel most morose, I like to see how someone else is doing and then I can forget about myself and suddenly I'm more cheerful. and those action is everything. I mean, for me, spirituality is action and... Virtual reality is action? Spirituality. Oh, spiritual.

1:06:59It probably is you make the best virtual reality of anyone. That's why it's such a wonderful way you, I suppose it's all about the person behind the virtual. So you're behind the one I like. Well, I pretty much see, I'm not really ever that sure what reality is. I mean, it's maybe too late in the evening to say that I don't actually think that we're all here.

1:07:33At all. I don't think we are, actually. We're not. Anyway, I do like it because it's when you realize how dreamlike things are and how they can just change in a second and how much you're participating in creating this reality, then your dreams start seeming to not be so strange. You know, so anyway, I had, I brought something tonight because I had a dream about your great grandfather. So I was going to, it's a very poorly realized dream because it's AI. Now, I really like AI a lot. I know that's not super popular these days. I use it a lot. I started out around the pandemic with working in Australia with this supercomputer, language supercomputer.

1:08:35And it's the biggest one in the world. And they said, you're the artist in residence here. What would you like this supercomputer to do? And I was like, it's a supercomputer. Can't it think of its own projects? It needs me to say, let's try this. So I said, let's teach it to read the Bible. because everyone's always saying, the Bible says this, the Bible says, what does the Bible say, really? I mean, you can hear all points of view being justified by, the Bible says this. So we put the three streams of language that make up the Bible, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek, and we put them on faders so that you could increase.

1:09:16The question is, if you increase the amount of Greek, would the Bible seem more rational? If you increase the amount of Hebrew, would it seem more mystical? Very inconclusive results. But what they did do was they put everything I've ever said, muttered, you know, whatever, into the supercomputer. They crossed it with the Bible. And they sent me a 9 ,000-page book, The Bible According to Me. If you want to read a horrifying thing. But you know what? They got my style. They got the whole thing. And so, but also it was making these, you know, things where I would try to make dreams sort of a little bit more real.

1:10:09So I'm going to show you one of these things I wrote about this dream. And let's look at this clip of this. If we could look at this video clip. It's about this moment when I was sitting in a cafe in Vienna talking with Freud. And we were talking about dread and death and, you know, why my life hasn't been going that well. And I was saying, you know, I really admire you because you take dreams so seriously. And Freud is saying, you know, basically almost nothing. He's nodding and blinking. And for some reason, I myself cannot stop blinking. Sometimes it turns into like a kind of winking. And I'm aware he might see this as a sign of, you know, female hysteria, but I just can't stop.

1:11:04So every time I look at him, he looks like a different person, you know. Anyway, we're talking about time and his theory that you have to go back in time to find that moment that shocked you as a child. And one of the events that shaped your life. And I was saying, you know, doctor, I don't have time to rummage through all this old stuff. It's all so long ago. And these things disappear. You know, they get buried in dreams. and then send out these cryptic little hints and then, you know, like, see this blue? Does this remind you of something? You know, this kind of thing. Anyway, after a while, I realize I'm doing all of the talking.

1:11:53And the waiter comes by with some schnapps and pastry. And we've been here, I guess, most of the afternoon by now. And I've been thinking about what he called his great question. And Freud was famous, among other things, for writing the words, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, I have never been able to answer the great question, what does a woman want? So I decided to ask him that question. And I said, Dr. Freud, what does a woman want? He looked really uncomfortable, and he just kept smoking, and he shook his head. And like in many awkward moments in a conversation, I suddenly picture the other person dead.

1:12:53Now, this always gives me this kind of strange feeling of empathy. But if there's one thing that I've learned in my life, it's that it's never possible to please dead people. You might have discovered that yourselves. And so I say, you know, actually, Dr. Freud, in your dreams, what do you see? And he said, I'm afraid our time is up.

1:13:32Bella, what do you see in your dreams?

1:13:40Well, is our time up? It is actually up. It is actually up. Yeah. Would you like to try to analyze a dream? I was given no direction by either of my parents, and particularly from my father around Sigmund Freud. So I have not read, I've read half of Interpretation of Dreams. So I actually don't know, I've read a comic book and I learned about his theory. so I read a graphic novel and I read the screenplay by Sarge that he wrote for John Huston. And so it's almost like I don't think I can. I have no idea except for he seems like a good thing and I prefer to have my shrink analyze my dreams I always wondered what he would dream about, though.

1:14:56God, I've never thought of that, ever. My father said that the only thing he said about him was that he was funny. And then he told me a joke, my father, that he went to this doctor once and said, and the doctor said, well, are you any relation of the grapefruit? and my dad said, the grapefruit, the grapefruit? Oh no, I have no relation of the grapefruit whatsoever. And that was, it was like, don't go there.

1:15:37Some things just don't relate to other things at all. Sometimes it's just a grapefruit. Yes. Yeah. Well, Laurie, thank you for being on Fashion Eurosis. And thank you for having me on Fashion Eurosis too. Thank you, Bella. It's been fun. Thank you.

1:16:17Thank you.

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