Laurie Anderson at Artforum:
In the 1970s I went to a lot of very long Bob Wilson performances, among them the legendary Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). They lasted for hours; some were all night. I often watched from the top of the nosebleed balcony—sometimes wrapped in a sleeping bag, the images onstage mixing with my dreams. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed something or saw it in a Bob Wilson performance.
When I began as an artist, Bob was my teacher of the biggest things I was struggling to learn about: time, meditation, light, and theater.
Once, a few years ago, I was walking across Fourteenth Street and I saw a very tall man who seemed to be standing in the middle of the sidewalk. There were two other shorter men next to him. As I approached them from behind, I had the feeling I was walking at triple speed, as if zipping past them on a moving walkway. As I passed, I saw that the tall man was Bob Wilson. “Hello, Bob!!” I said as I sped by. He smiled and made the short bird croak that he used as a laugh. “Lauuuuurie! Only four more hours to go!” It was then that I saw what was in front of us, hanging over the Hudson River at the end of the street: an enormous glowing orange ball, like something from an Egyptian myth.
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So who is Ray Kurzweil?
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Everyone agrees that modern poetry in France—and therefore in Europe—starts with Charles Baudelaire. But no one agrees on why. His successors, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, are each in their own way more patently radical, and the same is true of his American contemporary Walt Whitman. How modern do you have to be to be a modern? Compared to their works, those of Baudelaire, despite their sulfurous aroma, are far more traditional; while he was an early adopter of the prose poem, his most influential poetry used received forms. “Baudelaire accomplished what classical prosody had always required, or rather what it had inaugurated. … His prosody has the same spiritual monotony as Racine’s,” Yves Bonnefoy once remarked. And beyond matters of form, some of Baudelaire’s content was familiar too. His exacerbated ambivalence toward his Haitian-born lover Jeanne Duval, the subject of so many of his poems, is as ancient as Catullus’s odi et amo; praise of drunkenness dates back to the Greeks; and his proud sense of damnation, of his “Heart great with rancor and bitter desires,” would have been second-hand news to Lord Byron. Was the “new shudder” that Victor Hugo perceived in Baudelaire’s writing new enough to make him, rather than the last of the Romantics (the one in whose work Romanticism, you might say, curdled), the first of the moderns?
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