right now. Visually, it’s film: I like Peter Greenaway for his very, very odd camera angles and odd narratives. He’s best known for his film, The Draughtsman’s Contract. CSQ: What about painters? L.A.: I’ve tended to change a lot depending on what I’m looking at at the moment. The Italian expressionists, I think, and that whole school. Graffiti-inspired art, stuff with words. This preoccupation with words makes itself felt over and over, throughout the concert. To quote Laurie Anderson quoting William Burroughs, “Language is a virus from outer space.” Language is too devious to have been invented. How can the Japanese language work, she puzzles, tongue-in-cheek, since, after all, “they just have pictures of these little characters." In a magic-hieroglyph video, little animal symbols undergo a series of musical transformations on the big screen and eventually turn into Japanese writing. Not only are there literary allusions (“Call me Ishmael”), constant double entendres, and lyrics in French and Japanese in .her performances, there’s a special high-tech mnemonic alphabet (. . .D DAY, E COLI, F STOP, G MEN, H BOMB, I BEAM, J WALK, K RATIONS . . .). The video pauses in the middle, at “N,” at home in NYC (where Anderson works out of a home studio called the “Lobby” in Tribeca), then incredibly makes it all the way through to Z ZZZ. “Langue d'Amour," another song from Mister Heartbreak, is set in the Garden of Eden, where the woman is in love with the snake because of the noises he makes with his tongue and the little bit of fire in his mouth. As Anderson sings this in her concert performance, all the interjections and space-filling words she uses appear over her head on the screen: “uh. . .anyway. . Jet’s see. . .OK.” It’s as though the song had a linguistectomy. Her rendition gives the song a whole new meaning. When I’d heard it on the album, it was a cute and possibly naughty story. Now it seems she's reinvented the myth. Original sin isn't phallic snakes or sexy tongues, it’s the Big Lie. It's the way words get twisted and communication becomes a matter of reading between the lines. Is the important text the story of the snake, or is it the distracting little words she uses so deliberately and that look so spontaneous? What really got us kicked out of paradise was when ttk nan and the woman contracted the language bug and stopped communicating, when A / one point, sAe plays Zier own body ide an instrument. SAe Aits densely in tAe /lead, slaps Aer Inee, Aer sAou/der and carious older places- sAe coaxes out a a>Ao/epercussive sympdony. Bui nobody's sure Aoa> s/ie does it. As always sAe's full of tricbs. it became dull and stupid to be “happy as clams.” Communication is no longer separate from technology, as Anderson is always telling us. There are new ways to misunderstand each other. And embedded in all these modern signals inevitably is a sort of warning, a few threats of nuclear extinction. The song “Excellent Birds,” for example, seems to be about military planes. The “falling snow” could be TV static or some kind of atomic rain, and the warning is there: . .when I see the future, I close my eyes.” The hand-held paper fans on stage are mirrored in fan shapes on the screen above that suggest the pattern of radioactive waves spreading out after an explosion. The victim of Hiroshima and the nuclear weapon are linked through this one Japanese symbol. The words warn, “watch out,” then, “this is the picture, you connect the dots,” as if trying to urge' us to take an active role in what we see, exhorting us not to be TV zombies enroute to destruction. Another aspect of the befuddlement — another side of Sharkey — is nostalgia. Anderson hasn’t thrown love out the window, and her performance is far from cold. She’s willing to get very close to the audience, to let us see her vulnerable side. In two film sequences, an enormous closeup of her face reveals every habitual twitch, every nuance of expression. This could easily have come across as an Orwellian Big Sister — instead its effect is intimate. Slowly and sheepishly she explains, “When I talk, I always try to appear more intelligent than I really am. It’s supposed to work.” Or she gives us her interpretation of dreams. “The color’s always wrong in them, and the plots are infantile,” she laments. Her face is correspondingly fuzzy, like a badly made film, as she tells us this and only clears up for the last frame when she concludes, “My dreams are always so . . . hackneyed.” These sequences make it easy to imagine her as a filmmaker, directing and starring in her own productions, and collaborating with other artists in the same way that she worked with talented musicians to make Mister Heartbreak. When I asked her about her future projects, she replied that in fact she was working on a video disk and a film of several short stories set to music for release later this year. The rain is beating down on the windshield as I drive back to Portland after her performance. When trucks swish past me, I am blinded for a minute or so by the blast of water and can only see their red tail lights. My friend is silent, and I am withdrawn but not exhausted. Laurie Anderson's images and phrases are mixing in my head in a dialogue with interminable pieces of piano music that I am enjoying on the radio. “The satellites are out tonight”; I feel like a modern girl speeding along the autobahn. Ordinarily, I don’t drive. This is a rented car; it turns out that it was a lot cheaper to rent a car than to take the train or even Greyhound — by some mystery of American transportation worthy of inclusion in Anderson's United States l-IV. She is distinctly responsible for this whole experience: she made us leave the city to see her, and the distance we had to travel necessitates this period of contemplation before I can tumble into bed, and dismiss the evening as entertainment. I’m thinking of the closing solo performance of “Walk the Dog," which she did when the audience demanded an encore. One of the lines describes Dolly Parton singing about how she just wants to go back home: "Now you know she doesn’t wanna go back home, and she knows she'll never go back there again.” It’s a nostalgia like Sharkey’s that produces these longings for the good old days. Anderson's sincerity and intelligence contrasts so sharply with the phoniness of this homesick cowgirl, and yet she’s just as rooted in America. She’s living in the present, and forcing us to do so too. • Anne Schmitt writes on visual arts and edits the calendar for Willamette Week. 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