Laurie Anderson 03/09/1995
Set I
The Nerve Bible
Set II
Set III
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Collectors With This Show
| User (active/rating) | Media / # | Show | Sound | Details | DB Source | User Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cotaper | dvd / 1 | B | View | |||
| Stuart Ferguson | DVD / 1 | View | Audience | |||
| Notes: | DVD 613; lineage: Lineage: Audience recording. VHS to DVDrecorder, DVD SHRINK to vob. Video/audio specs:NTSC, Frame rate 29 frames/second, 128 kbps, frame width 720, frame hight 480 | |||||
| Matt Vernon | DVD5 / 1 | View | ||||
| Notes: | Date: March 9, 1995 Venue: The Music Hall, Kansas City, MO Video/audio specs:NTSC, Frame rate 29 frames/second, 128 kbps, frame width 720, frame hight 480 Lineage: VHS to DVDrecorder, DVD SHRINK to vob The Nerve Bible live artist: Laurie Anderson Judging from the diverse range of hipsters filing into Lisner Auditorium to see Laurie Anderson perform, it was clear that this was not yet another tour sponsored by a major label of watery beer. As it turns out, this is the first worldwide tour to be sponsored by a CD ROM company. A new sign of the times? Also, the stuff being peddled in the lobby before the show took on every conceivable medium: concert books, regular books, videos, CD ROMS, a number of conventional CD's, and a couple different T-shirts. All of this makes you wonder, just what is the ideal medium for Ms. Anderson's art? (It made me wonder which thing I should be reviewing.) After seeing the show, I can tell you: live is her medium. Few of us can handle wide varieties of new technology with all the grace and creative poise Laurie Anderson does. Many of us, as it turns out, are complete klutzes when it comes to new electrified inventions. We can spend hours staring and poking at them, not knowing exactly how to apply them to our lives. You may say, "Hey, speak for yourself, Glenn. I'm surfin' the Web!" but tell me this: are you completely confident that, any second now, your whole system won't just decide to seize up? Are you sure, during any given hour, that this isn't a complete and utter waste of your time? Well, Laurie is. A Technological Voice Watching Ms. Anderson, one gets the sense that she eats silicon chips sprinkled over her shredded wheat for breakfast. Up there on stage, she appears as the ideal future human living in perfect harmony with all sorts of electronically synchronized equipment. Seeing the expert timing of her stage show is to see a person literally in synch with modern technology. All kinds of technology. There were three huge rear projection screens; two others in the shape of a cube and a sphere; bunches of colored lights, the occasional laser; speakers everywhere; a number of ramps and stage props; lots of prerecorded music and sound effects; Anderson's patented instrumental gadgets like the violin that sounds as if she's playing an entire symphony at once; just one keyboard, one guitar; a few miniscule video cameras; and a handful of plain old microphones. Maybe none of this is really all that new. Still, I don't think all this technology has been used in quite the same way before. It is the seamless combination of all the above mechanisms that often makes them appear new again and gives the show its progressive feel. Still Human at the Center And here is what really makes Anderson the artist she is: in front of and among all of this technological wizardry, that one little woman is still the most fascinating thing on the stage. What kept the audience entertained for a full 2.5 hours (including intermission) was not the pile of electronic contraptions so much as the content and context Anderson gave to them. The (for lack of a better word) themes (modes, motifs?) that zapped through The Nerve Bible were not only the quaint little ones like life, death, time, and international relations, but also the very idea of how we perceive them: "What I like most about cyberspace is the gossip" -- like how she heard the AP report the other day about the "Vatican being bought by Microsoft. The so called Archbishop sounded thrilled: 'We've been using icons for over 2000 years. Microsoft has only had them for three! Imagine the possibilities!'" Often, she goes off the edge of playful technofun into the visually and aurally disturbing. This is not such a bad thing, in and of itself, but it creates an interesting paradox in her work. That is, on the one hand Anderson seems to be asking us to embrace technology and progress with all the grace and poise she has achieved. On the other, technology often conspires with Anderson to create highly unsettling effects. Maybe there is an unspoken, albeit common, warning in all of this: we will have to take the bad technology with the good. Keeping the Oral Tradition Alive Watching her show, I felt I was having a glimpse of what is beyond postmodernism. Sure, Anderson uses all the latest toys, makes reference to all the cutting edge technotrends, yet she hyperlinks it all to her personal experience, which has often taken her far and away from any computerized medium. Stories of her hitchhiking to the north pole, nearly dying of altitude sickness in a trek across Tibet, or spending time with a remote Mayan tribe, take our minds so far away that we forget that there is anything in the room even so hi tech as a light switch. Through all the static, the simple oral tradition of storytelling still comes through as clear as Anderson's perfect voice. Uniting her own brand of schizophrenic folk tales and modern myths with synthetic keyboard textures and a collection of new and recycled video images, Anderson succeeds in creating a New Art with a distinctly human touch. I had the opportunity to meet Ms. Anderson during her last big tour several years ago. Not only was I taken by the calm, sane, and friendly manner in which she handled the company of the strangers around her backstage, but I was also surprised at how short she was. Yes, short. Had I my wits about me, and I rarely do, I would have said, "Gee, you look a lot taller in multimedia." Had she had her wits about her, and she always does, she surely would have said, "Of course. Doesn't everybody?" without misfiring a single synapse in her perfect composure. ********************************************************* | |||||
| Sigmund BoPs | DVD / 1 | View | ||||
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