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The Cultural Ambassador
Laurie Anderson

Anyway, I was in Israel as a kind of cultural ambassador and there were lots of press conferences scheduled around the performances. The journalists usually started things off by asking about the avant-garde.
€” So, what's so good about new? they'd ask.

€” Well, new is€ interesting.

€” And what, they would say, is so good about interesting?

€” Well, interesting is, you know€ it's€ interesting. It's like€ being awake, you know, I'm treading water now.

€” And what is so good about being awake? they'd say.

Finally I got the hang of this: never answer a question in Israel, always answer by asking another question. But the Israelis were vey curious about the Gulf War and what Americans had thought about it, and I tried to think of a good question to ask and answer to this, but what was really on my mind was that the week before I had myself been testing explosives in a parking lot in Tel Aviv. Now this happened because I had brought some small stage bombs to Israel as props for this performance and the Israeli promoter was very interested in them. And it turned out that he was on weekend duty on one of the bomb squads, and bombs were also something of a hobby during the week. So I said:

€” Look, you know, these bombs are nothing special, just, just a little smoke

And he said:

€” Well, we can get much better things for you.

And I said:

€” No really, these are fine€

And he said:

€” No but it should be big, theatrical. It should make an impression, I mean you really just the right bomb.

And so one morning he arranged to have about fifty small bombs delivered to a parking lot, and since he looked on it as a sort of special surprise favor, I couldn't really refuse, so we are on this parking lot testing the bombs, and after the first few explosions, I found I was really getting pretty€ interested.

They all had very different characteristics: some had fiery orange tails, and made these low paah, paah, paah, popping sound; others exploded mid-air and left long smoky, slinky trails, and he had several of each kind in case I needed to review them all at the end, and I'm thinking:

€” Here I am, a citizen of the world's largest arms supplier, setting off bombs with the world's second largest arms customer, and I'm having a great time!

So even though the diplomatic part of the trip wasn't going so well, at least I was getting some instruction in terrorism. And it reminded me of something in a book by Don DeLillo about how terrorists are the only true artists left, because they're the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people. And the other thing it reminded me of, were all the attempts during the Gulf War to outwit the terrorists, and I especially remember an interesting list of tips devised by the US embassy in Madrid, and these tips were designed for Americans who found themselves in war-time airports. The idea was not to call ourselves to the attention of the numerous foreign terrorists who were presumably lurking all over the terminal, so the embassy tips were a list of mostly don'ts. Things like: don't wear a baseball cap; don't wear a sweat shirt with the name of an American university on it; don't wear Timberlands with no socks; don't chew gum; don't yell €œEthel, our plane is leaving!€. I mean it's weird when your entire culture can be summed up in eight giveaway characteristics.

And during the Gulf War I was traveling around Europe with a lot of equipment, and all the airports were full of security guards who would suddenly point to a suitcase and start yelling:

€” Whose bag is this? I wanna know right now who owns this bag.

And huge groups of passengers would start #170430 out for the bag, just running around in circles like a Skud missile on its way in, and I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guessed I did seem a little fishy; a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Adam Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren't some kind of espionage system. So I've done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I'd have to keep setting all this stuff up and they'd listen for a while and they'd say:

€” So uh, what's this?

And I'd pull out something like this filter and say:

€” Now this is what I'd like to think of as the voice of Authority.

And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say:

€” Now, why would you want to talk like that?

And I'd look around at the ###170549 and the undercover agents and the dogs and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Superbowl coverage of the war. And I'd say:

€” Take a wild guess.

Finally of course, I got through, with this after all American-made equipment, and the customs agents were all talking about the effectiveness, no the beauty, the elegance, of the American strategy of pinpoint bombing. The high tech surgical approach, which was being reported by CNN as something between grand opera and the Superbowl, like the first reports before the blackout when TV was live and everything was heightened, and it was so€ euphoric.


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Lyrics by Laurie Anderson

  A Curious Phenomenon   Another Day in America   Baby Doll   Babydoll   Bagpipe Solo   Beautiful Pea Green Boat   Beautiful Red Dress   Beginning French   Big Science   Blue Lagoon   Bodies In Motion   Born, Never Asked   Bright Red   Broken   Cartoon Song   City Song   Classified   Closed Circuits   Coolsvile   Coolsville   Dance of Electricity   Dark Angel   Dark Time In The Revolution   Day The Devil   Democratic Way   Difficult Listening Hour   Dream Before   EngliSH   Example #22   Excellent Birds   Falling   False Documents   Finnish Farmers   Four, Three, Two, One   Frames For The Pictures   Free Fall   Freefall   From The Air   Gravity's Angel   Hey Ah   Hiawatha   I Dreamed I Had To Take A Test   In Our Sleep   In Our Sleep [Instrumental][Mix]   It Tango   It Was Up In The Mountains   John Lilly   Kokoku   Language is a Virus   Langue D'amour   Late Show   Let X = X   Let X=X   Life on a String   Lighting Out For The Territories   Looking For You; Walking And Falling   Love Among The Sailors   Mach 20   Maria Teresa Teresa Maria   Monkey's Paw   Muddy River   My Compensation   My Eyes   My Right Eye   New Jersey Turnpike   New York Social Life   Night In Baghdad   O Superman   O Superman (For Massenet)   Odd Objects   On The Way To Jerusalem   One Beautiful Evening   One White Whale   Only an Expert   Over The River   Pieces and Parts   Poison   Poison [Instrumental][Mix]   Private Property   Puppet Motel   Ramon   Red Hot   Same Time Tommrow   Same Time Tomorrow   Say Hello   Sharkey's Day   Sharkey's Day (Single Edit)   Sharkey's Night   Slip Away   Smoke Rings   So Happy Birthday   Someone Else's Dream   Song For Two Jims   Speak My Language   Speechless   Speechless (The Eagle and the Weasel)   Statue of liberty   Steven Weed   Stiff Neck   Strange Angels   Strange Perfumes   Structuralist Filmmaking   Sweaters   Talk Normal   Talkshow   Telephone Song   The Beginning of Memory   The Big Top   The Day the Devil   The Dream Before   The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)   The End Of The World   The Geographic North Pole   The Guests   The Healing Horn   The Hollywood Strangler   The Island Where I Come From   The Lake   The Language Of The Future   The Mailman’s Nightmare   The Mysterious "J"   The Mysterious \   The Mysterious "J"   The Night Flight From Houston   The Ouija Board   The Puppet Motel   The Rotowhirl   The Salesman   The Soul Is A Bird   The Stranger   The Ugly One With The Jewels   The Visitors   Thinking Of You   Three Songs For Paper, Film And Video   Three Walking Songs   Tightrope   Time And A Half   Transitory Life   Turning Time Around [Lou Reed]   Voices On Tape   Walk The Dog   Walking & Falling   Walking & Falling   Walking Falling   Washington Street   White Lily   Word Of Mouth   World Without End   Yankee See

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