Last Week

by Robert Boyd


Robert Boyd and Woody Golden's Terra Antenna at Summer Fest.

Last week...

• We wished happy birthday to Laurie Anderson.
• We talked to Cuban artist Franklin Alvarez, whose work is on view at Redbud Gallery.
• We walked through Sasha Dela's The Emotional Life of a Spy at the Art League.
• We looked at the art at Free Press Summer Fest and proposed a set of guidelines for successful art for music festivals.
• We got out of the heat and went to the movies at the Cineplex at CAMH.
• We checked out Ibsen Espada's squeegee paintings.
• And we showed images of deadly objects rendered in porcelain and glass.

Happy Birthday Laurie Anderson

by Robert Boyd

I was a college freshman in 1981 when "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson was released as a single. My dorm-mates and I loved it but found it mystifying. We were especially curious about how she made that repeating "hanh hanh hanh hanh" noise. One of my roommates played sax, and he got where he could exactly duplicate it. So we concluded that it was a single note on the saxophone played over and over. (Of course, it is Anderson's own voice, run on a tape loop--but we didn't learn this until much later.)



Happy 65th birthday, Laurie Anderson!