I am not frightened
I am just scared to death
this time for real now
        -- Young Mary Lincoln

Eventually though,
the ouija's written words
seemed to take on a personality,
a kind of a voice.
Finally, we began to ask the board if the ouija would be willing to appear to us in some other form.
"Forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it."
The ouija seemed like it was about to crash.
Please, please, what can we do, we were nagging it now, so you will show yourself to us in some other manifestation?
"You should... lurk.
You should L-- U-- R-- K--
Lurk."
Now, I never really figured out how to lurk in my own place,
even though it was only a rented place.
But I did find myself looking over my shoulder a lot.
And every sound that drifted in
seemed to be a version of this phantom voice
whispering in a code
that I could never crack.
        --"The Ouija Board."

"We're in record."
        --"Same Time Tomorrow."

And so, January finds me in Calgary and the weather is mostly warm and wet.  When it isn't bitterly cold and wet.
        Alex is working freelance, so he stays inside most days, writing.  His days involve waking early, surfing the Net in near darkness in order to get focused, writing bits of stories, phoning people to set up interviews and then surfing the Net some more while he waits for people to get back to him.  Occasionally, he actually interviews people.  Then he surfs the Net while waiting for the ambition needed to write bits of more stories.  Then he writes some more.  Eventually, in the evening, maybe he watches some tv.  Then he writes more, and surfs the net more.  To keep himself from going insane he edits stuff in Wikipedia.
        His schedule leaves me with a lot of time to wander around alone, which is fine by me.  Most of the time these days I simply want to be left alone, anyway.
        When I'm alone I think, I stare, I look at people walking by and wonder how they can cope with the complexities of interpersonal interaction.  They all seem so much happier and more well adjusted than me.
        And then it hits me:
        Most of them just don't care.  They lack either the depth or the desire to care.  And they prop up their apathy and ignorance with nonsense like belief systems and hope.  It's easy to walk hand in hand with this week's lover-of-choice if you don't really give a fuck about anyone but yourself, if you don't really care how much they always hurt you or you hurt them.  It's easy to do anything like a zombie if you know you're going to Heaven when you die.
        So, I walk around Calgary, looking at the skyscrapers, all the glass and steel, and yet not as much glass and steel as I'd like.  Glass and steel showing the universe who and what we are.  I always think of pure, crystal tones when I see skyscrapers.  I think of harmony in nature.
        The sky, to me, just looks like the data input channel on my dvd player.  Trees look like plastic props.  Birds and dogs sound like canned sound effects.
        Looking at the C-Train, the people rushing around, I feel a relaxed bliss.
        Almost a million people here, now and still there's kind of a small town feeling in Calgary that makes the place seem kind of uncertain, a little confused.  And yet, as far back as I remember it, it's never really been a "small town."  Granted, the population has exploded in the last few years, but when Alex and I first started coming here, before he moved here, the population was still around 5-to-600,000..

And we go to Edmonton, me 'n' Alex.  We drive around, on yet another shopping expedition.
        I love being in stores, being in malls.  Being inside that pure, crystal tone.
        There's a sense of excitement, freedom, the potential of acquisition.  It makes my heart race.  Or, maybe that's just the arrhythmia.
        Being in malls, looking in stores is wonderful.  But the act of consciously shopping is getting so tiring, now.  The buying, the purchasing.  No matter how many cds and books I buy, I'm not happy.  Things, material goods, just do not make me happy, and yet I know that anything approximating an inner life is just another lie.  So I'm trapped.
        But I still end up spending hundreds of dollars on cds of Industrial Music and Noise, anything to take the edge off.
        It doesn't take the edge off.

And, days pass, and finally we go to the show.
        The audience is a mixture of everybody.  Almost every type is represented.  Professorish-looking people, housewives, businessmen and -women, slackers, hippies, neo-hippies.  Old men and old women, the young.  Teens, children, punks.  A couple of people with cowboy hats.  Arty types, the nerd chic, average folks and the avant-weird.  The pierced and the non-pierced.  Red, yellow, black, and white.  A wide cross section.
        And I take my seat.
        And I look at the stage.
        The setup on the stage, oriented to my perspective:
        There's a chair to my left, and a microphone beside the chair.  In the centre of the stage, a small black box on a podium.  Behind and to the left of the box, a stand with a holster for her violin.  To the right of the box, there's a small screen.  Behind this setup, there are several small candles set on the stage in constellation like patterns.
        I sit and wait with Alex.  We talk a bit about nothing in particular.  Stuff like: "I never thought I'd ever see her," "Yeah, me too."  Things like that.
        I wonder if I actually turned my cell phone off.  I pull the phone out of my pocket, activate it, check the menu.  It is on mute.  It's set to vibrate.  Good.
        So I put the phone back in my pocket.
        Then I wonder if the mute is actually going to work, or maybe I turned the mute off when I checked the phone.
        So I take the phone out of my pocket, again.  I activate it, again.  I check the menu, again.  It's still on mute and set to vibrate.
        So I put the phone back in my pocket, again, only to begin wondering if the vibrate and the mute were somehow turned off the last time I checked the phone.
        So, I take the phone out of my pocket, again....
        This goes on for a while until I convince myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that the at the phone will indeed be silent during the show.
        Then the lights dim and there's stage fog.
        Later on, I read a review of the show where the reviewer thought that somebody like Laurie Anderson using a fog effect was maybe kind of cheesy.
        I'm not really sure how I feel about the smoke thing.  After all, I've never actually seen her live, although I saw Home Of The Brave and there was no stage fog in that movie.

I can't really do it justice, but, anyway:
        Laurie comes out, and sits on the chair, and The End Of The Moon begins.
        Throughout the show, she alternates between spoken monologues delivered in her characteristically halting, arch, and sometimes menacing style, and violin solos that border on atonality.  The sound of her violin is harsh and cutting, and the violin is placed on a digital delay so she can accompany herself and create layers of sound.  The rest of the music that accompanies her is controlled by the box on the podium.  She presses buttons on the box.  This changes beats and ambient sound.  The box is either some sort of small synthesized, possibly homemade, or a controller / sequencer patched into other equipment offstage.
        The music is comprised of minimalistic beats and drones, sometimes playful and sometimes sinister.  Laurie is at her best when she's working on a minimal level.  Give her a beat, something unchanging and steady and robotic, and let her talk.  Or a drone, or a wall of sound.  When she gets too ornate she tends to get lost in the textures of the music that surrounds her, and since, for the most part, her work deals with that aspect of language that is the word-- written or spoken-- and the way the word is bent and reflected and refracted by technology, even while admitting that the word is itself technology, technology that both shapes and simulates and filters the real world, and without which there would be no us, no world, no reality, when she gets lost in the meandering of music the majority of her content is, to a certain degree, weakened.
        Throughout most of the show, a slide of the moon's surface is shown on the screen at the right of the stage.  My right, not hers.  And at one point, Laurie activates a camera set on the end of a special violin bow, and when she creates walls of sound on the violin, we see quadrants of her face alternately in extreme closeup and then receding.

The End Of The Moon starts with short freeform stream of consciousness routine that ends in a short reference to both "Say Hello" and "Lighting Out For The Territories" the two pieces that bookend her mammoth United States.  When she does this, she invokes that earlier work and all the themes that run through it.  It's kind of like when Pynchon invokes Gravity's Rainbow in the first paragraph of Mason & Dixon.  She's letting us all know that she's not fucking around, here.  This is a big one, guys.  So sit up straight and pay attention.
        Also, by invoking United States, she anchors The End Of The Moon firmly to her, in my mind, real stuff.  Strories, observations, routines.  More speaking and less singing.  And I'm glad.
        I mean, she has a nice singing voice, and her more traditional-sounding songs are okay, but she's at her best when she speaks in that halting, deadpan, distant way.  Arch, funny, dark, smart.  Kind of talk-singing, kind of like Lou Reed.  And when you think of that the fact that they're a couple, their pairing makes a lot of sense.
        And I do recognize that people tend to gravitate the albums where she sings.  And I think Strange Angels and Life On A String are her best sellers-- with maybe the exception of the "O Superman" single.  But, frankly, compared to works like U.S., Bright Red, and Ugly One With The Jewels, both Strange Angels and Life On A String lack a certain caustic drive, a political and aesthetic punch, even if they do contain nice, quirky, personal songs.
        But there are no nice, quirky, personal songs in The End Of The Moon.  She goes for the throat in The End Of The Moon.
        It's just Laurie with her gadgets, her violin, and her clinical distance.  Sometimes funny, sometimes enraged, sometimes sad.
        And she talks, stops, and then talks some more.

Anyway:
        After the brief introduction, she stands, plays the violin, and fills the hall with layers of raw sound.  And then she's off:
        Subject matter careens from the funny to the menacing to the sad.  Sometimes in one routine.
        She covers her stint as the first artist in residence at NASA, and also, unsurprisingly, the last artist in residence at NASA.  She touches on her seeming disillusionment with the space program, how it seems like it's still just being used to go up and come down and do not much else.  Military stuff, spying.
        She talks about the Challenger explosion and how "our technology's falling apart, scattering down over our heads again."  She clearly still likes technology-- after all, she's surrounded by it-- but there's still a strong strain of wariness running through her-- not quite pessimism, but more of a well-we'll-just-wait-and-see-how-it-goes sort of thing.
        She talks about this time she did a live show outdoors.  How she got into the act and lost track of what her backup band was doing.  And she played and played and there was this beautiful sound, kind of weird, sort of natural but maybe also a little electronic.  And she eventually realized that she'd been doing a duet with a bird and the band had actually stopped a long time ago.  And then went on a bit about animal language and animal art.
        She talks about relationships, men and women, that sorta stuff.  Infinitely less cloying than when someone like Fiona Apple or Tori Amos goes over this terrain.  Much, much smarter.  And because of Laurie's status as the perpetual outsider, everything she says about gender relations and love somehow seems much more honest.
        She wants to do a Gravity's Rainbow opera, she has all the musical parts figured out, "Slothrop's Theme" and all that, and so she contacts Pynchon and doesn't think she'll even get a response, but then Pynchon okays it except that he stipulates that it has to be scored for banjo only.
        She goes hiking with her terrier, Lolabelle.  And she's walking through the woods with Lolabelle and Lolabelle's always running ahead and back, patrolling borders, going out, coming back, making sure Laurie's safe, checking out the scene.  And then one morning, Laurie wakes up and comes out of her tent and sees all these black shapes hovering over the dog.  They're vultures, and Lolabelle's confused and panicked, trying to fight them off and also grappling with sudden awareness of a third spatial dimension that must somehow be patrolled and defended.
        Afterwards, the dog sticks close to Laurie, too scared to patrol the ground-level borders she can fathom, let alone this new world above her.
        So the dog walks, head up, nervously scanning the sky, awestruck by the realization that they can also come from the air....

At the end of one routine, near the beginning of the show, Laurie's interrupted by a chorus of undisciplined applause that throws her off kilter a bit.  She seems annoyed, which she should be.  After all, the noise of all these people almost cut her off in mid flow.  She looks irritated, and eventually crowd settles down.  I kind of wonder what these people are thinking.  There are shows where you applaud and scream, and then are shows where you keep a cork in it in until the end.  Laugh, sure, because she's funny.  But Jesus Christ, two minutes of redneck clapping in the middle of a show can fuck up anybody's timing.

And there are countless other little bits and observations and routines I can't really remember because they all tend to blend together into one big continuum.
        On the surface the monologues and songs are simple, or short and oblique, but when you dig deeper there's always more and more going on in her words, more meanings opening up until things begin echoing each other, drawing lines between each other, like a web or matrix of data.

Let's go back and think about the title a bit.  The End Of The Moon.  What does this mean?  I see two main parts, here. The End and Of The Moon.  The The End part is simple enough to grapple with.  The end: final point, finito, this is it, the terminal point, no more after this one.  But the end of what?  Of The Moon?  What the hell does that mean?  What does the moon mean?
        In our culture, many things resonate in the word "moon":
        You have images of the sky, of a thing that hangs in the sky, of the thing that (until very recently) has been the closest thing utterly out of our grasp, close enough to actually see the surface of but so impossibly situated out of our reach it begins to stand for the unknowable and the mysterious.
        You've got NASA and the first (and so far only) manned exploration onto this unknown which represents The True Unknown, and that unknown ultimately being more than just a little knowable and banal.  And how that first moon landing was in a sense the end of the moon-- the end of the mystery.  And mystery is what motivates us.  Without mystery we stop doing anything meaningful.  And mystery is ending, or maybe has already ended.
        (But even the end of the mysterious can be kind of a mystery in itself.)
        And, also, you have the moon as that object up there, that signpost that stands in our way before deep space.  So there still is a mystery, aftre all, after the end of the moon.  But before deep space, we have to get to the moon, we have to cross the moon, and we're not doing that.  That has ended as well.  A single trip to the moon years "ending" the moon, and then no trips beyond the moon, and so ending again what the moon-- even despite the moon landing's demystification-- still stands for.
        You also have the idea of shooting for the moon.  Hopes, dreams, unknowability.  And the end of all these, destroyed by science and politics and human nature.
        The moon as a symbol of nature, cycles, both bodily cycles and concrete physical recursion.  And the ends of these things.  The end of nature, of the human body as it merges with the very technology that threatens to both demystify the world and come crashing down onto our heads again and again.  A cycle within the end of cycles, and yet maybe even a way out because this end of all cycles is-- possibly-- what happens as we reach into the future, as be start becoming something other than what we currently are.
        And, frankly, the moon can mean anything at all because we make it mean things.  As a symbol it stands for a symbol of our symbol-making power.  A kind of hypersymbol, a hypermetaphor.  And, so, if the moon ends, our meaning of the moon ends, and so does our ability to make meaning.  And so we end because all we are are our meanings, our languages.  So you've got the end of all our symbols, signs, signifiers and signifieds.
        And the end of time, because the moon represents history and striving.  Everything humanity has ever done can be seen as a metaphoric attempt to "reach the moon."  Embrace and grapple with and land on the unknown, to understand.  This is what drives history, time, culture.  But once this ends happens, then what?  And so now we're back at mystery.  Another cycle.  But there are no cycles left because the "moon" has "ended."
        The end of time, mystery, science, language, nature and the human, among other things.
        And of course whatever it is that happens when we move beyond.
        In other words, the 21st Century.

Everything drifting above cold, distant beats and twitters punctuated by angry, mournful and sometimes screaming violin harmonics, and thrumming, deep drones.

And still, even after all the years she's been doing stuff, and all the stuff she's seen, she still manages to exude a kind of gosh-gee-whiz, kid-in-a candy-store, wide-eyed sort of aura.  Like everything is still exiting and fresh and new.

Laurie ends the performance with a cryptic, associative routine that seems to imply some of what I've just written above.
        There's a point where the routine seems to drain her until she almost breaks down on stage.
        What the monologue seems to be about on the surface is love and betrayal, in some form.  But it could also be a metaphor for her relationship with NASA, the USA, and her audience; or a rape; or two lovers breaking up, despairing and enraged; or something else.
        It's a recapitulation of everything, and so dense you'd have to sit back, and read a transcript of it and really dig through it to zero in on the multiple fields of reference she's layered onto themselves.  And this is a good thing.  Like most really good postmodernism that last routine builds on its own denseness, clichés, hyperbole and referentiality until it turns into something new.  It's at once personal and universal, detached and yet extremely emotional.
        And she's done.
        Applause.  Actual, real applause, now.  Not the unfocused clapping of a bunch of confused rednecks.
        She bows, seems shaken and relieved, slightly nervous.  Runs off stage, comes back.  Beams a big dimply smile.  Bows again and is gone.
        And I'm wrenched inside, too.
        I feel kind of like I'm about to witness the end of the world.

The after-show party:
        We have our tickets, we go into a small room.  There are little snacks and booze.
        Everybody forms little groups.  Mostly, all the people here seem to know each other.  Probably people from the local art scene.
        The cute girl who plays Karen on Ken Finkelman's show The Newsroom is there, too.  Or, someone who looks a lot like her, anyway.
        And so, because quiet observation is the job I often find myself relegated to in most social events, I observe quietly:
        A young girl sitting alone, bored.  She looks about 15.  She's here with her mom who's talking to some guy dressed in a brown suit.
        Two old men in tuxedos.  At first I think they're waiters, but then I see them ordering drinks from a guy who doesn't really look that much different from them.
        A thin, angular guy with tiny glasses and a ponytail.
        Some bored looking university types.
        I'm thrown by how everybody here looks so average, so middle-class, and how most of them don't seem to care where they are or what they're doing.  An interesting effect given the wide spectrum of people who were at the show.
        Mind you, I probably look the same, like some undercover security guard standing alone, watching everything and everybody.
        I order a drink.
        I never know what to order when I'm at a bar, so I always order scotch.  I don't really like scotch, in fact I think it tastes kind of like burning plastic, but I always say scotch.  I think scotch is supposed to be made out of apples, but it doesn't really taste like apples.  It's kind of a cyberpunk taste.  It tastes kind of like the way a melting motherboard smells.
        Four dollars gets you just enough scotch to barely coat the ice cubes in a plastic cup.  We're talking, maybe three millimeters of scotch.  Not even enough to taste, which is probably for the best.  I suppose.
        So, with my drink, I watch people, again.
        Bored girl still sitting, bored.
        More people coming in.  They look like all the others.
        A fat middle-aged woman laughs and she sounds like some sort of chattering creature.
        A guy somewhere behind me says "Woooaaaah" and then laughs.

Jostled by people on the way to get snacks.
        They're crackers with bits of fish on them, or bacon, or cream cheese, maybe beef on another.  They taste good, so I eat a bunch and a waiter brings out another tray.
        I go get another overpriced scotch.  I can't tell if I actually drank the one in my hand, or if it just all evaporated because there was so little of it.
        Alex is wandering around, not really talking to anybody, looking out of place.  I'd also like to talk to people, but they're all ignoring me in favour of free food and friends.
        I could talk to Alex, I suppose, but I get to talk to him all the time and I'd actually like to talk to someone else, here.  But everyone is ignoring me and I don't know how to introduce myself without seeming like a jackass.  So I stand alone.
        Eventually, Laurie Anderson sneaks into the room and nobody even notices her.  Spiky-haired and really tiny.
        Eventually, people realize that she's there, and they begin clustering around her.  Mostly, the Calgary art scene people.  Although, some fans are also jockeying for position.
        She seems at home in the crowd, if a little wary.  She's not as stunned-looking and terrified as Philip Glass seemed to be in Toronto.  No deer-in-the-headlights look, no desperately restrained urge to recoil.
        She laughs a lot, too.  She seems extremely happy and good natured.  Like she'd be fun to just hang out with, go shopping with on a Saturday, check out the bookstores and maybe hit a couple of museums.
        I hang back and listen to some of what she's saying to whoever she's talking to at any given moment:
        She's explaining to someone the delay system on the violin.
        Turns out Lou is at home looking after Lolabelle.
        A guy hands her an old record of her to sign.  A copy of Mister Heartbreak, I think.  She feigns amazement at how big the record is.  And, well, records do look really big now, in comparison to cds.
        And Alex is there and he's suddenly proactive and butting through the morass and I follow him.
        And then he says Hi, and she says Hi, and I say Hi, she says Hi.
        And Alex tells her that I'm the reason he started listening to her in highschool.  I shake her hand.  She has small hands.  I tell her that the show was good, just, wow, just, there's no words for how good it was, wow.  She blushes a bit.  One alien being meeting another alien being.
        A guy named Darren Unrau takes our picture.  Me and Alex and Laurie Anderson.  She's laughing because she has to stand on tiptoes to get into the picture, I'm a little drunk and look kind of out of it.  Or maybe I'm just it of it because I'm just out of it.  I haven't really had that much to drink.  But I feel so out of it.
        Alex just looks kind of dopey for some reason.  Unrau says he'll e-mail the picture to Alex in a couple of days.
        Then she has to go.  She's only been here for an hour, but she has to pack up her gear and head out tomorrow.

Afterwards, Alex and I drive home.  I tell Alex to drive because I've been drinking a bit, and with my luck lately I'd get caught in a spot check.
        So I sit and look out the window and watch dark houses pass by.
        Skyscrapers, a freeway.
        Look at the river.
        I regret not having talked to Laurie more. But then again, why would she talk to me about anything anyway?  We don't know each other and I'm also not part of the Calgary art scene-- which while probably not really connected to Laurie Anderson, is definitely closer to her than I am.  At least on some sort of art/peer level.  Also, the One Yellow Rabbit people probably have more right to gobble up her attention than I do.  Also, what would have I talked to her about?  Gosh-gee-I-love-yer-stuff sorta crap?  I wouldn't've minded talking to her about Kathy Acker, though.  I know she knew Acker.  Or discussed Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon (she should do that Pynchon opera, get a few banjos and put them through filters and delays, grab Robert Wilson's eye, and turn the whole thing into a multi-hour, multi-part CIVIL warS-scale extravaganza.  I'll help!  I can probably make a banjo sound like a V2!!!), Haruki Murakami, or any of the other writers who're common interests.  I dunno.  I do regret not really talking to her much, though.
        It's foggy out.
        Eventually, it gets so gray you can't see the street.
        And we drive into the grayness, and it envelops us, and all that's left is mist.
        That night, I don't dream.

(See the Laurie Anderson Picture, here.)

Next:  Cerebus, again....

Epilogue 73w.
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