Got to chat with Laurie Anderson backstage after a show...
...totally unexpectedly. Very small group of people -- five of us and herself. (At the time we were involved with Vancouver's only weekly experimental radio program, so we had an easy in.)

The thing is, in preparation for seeing a Laurie Anderson show, nearly all of us had taken LSD. My friends had opted for museum doses, since we'd be dealing with crowds and all that -- but I had decided that I wanted to be well and truly tripping, so I had taken three tabs of blotter.

Laurie Anderson is somewhat oblique in conversation. All of my friends seemed to be on a bit of a time delay, as if they were talking to her via satellite uplink from a colony on Pluto.

Me? No matter how hard I tried, it seemed I could only speak in non-sequiturs. Every time I spoke, Ms. Anderson pointed her chin at me and raised her left eyebrow ever so slightly. I became fascinated by this -- it was so consistent that I was certain it carried semiotic content.

After a while I began to purposefully interject, just to watch her response. It was too consistent. It was clearly automated. Laurie Anderson was an interactive collection of three-dimensional video loops that walked amongst us! Wow. Heavy.

Happily, my friends represented me a little better than I managed myself, describing some of my poor work (with tape collage) in superlative terms. Before we left, Ms. Anderson shook my hand and said that it had been very "interesting" to meet me.

Mmm. Yeah.
(Larry_Mudd, Fri 30 Jun 2006, 14:49, Reply)