Her Private Happy Meal

The weather outside is chilling, a typical mid-January day here. But Laurie Anderson’s loft feels like a creative refuge, an escape from the outside world.

Anderson has long called this TriBeCa building home and factory, with its Hudson River view to die for. She happily gives a visitor a tour, showing off a humble equipment station, with a keyboard, basic mixing equipment and sound devices, and her headless electric violin. She points to a few Line 6 sound processors with the proud grin of a geek with a new toy. “These are great. Lou gave me them.” Lou being Lou Reed, her romantic other.

This modest set-up, no more intricate than what you’d find in your local cocktail lounge, is the cockpit for “Happiness,” a new work that Anderson will perform, in its premiere, at UC Santa Barbara on Wednesday and Thursday, and then take to UCLA on Feb. 9. By her often complex technological standards, the new solo work is a soul-searching, minimalist statement--an evening-long piece that interweaves songs and stories, accompanied by Anderson on violin and keyboards.

She is a native Midwesterner (born in Chicago; reared in Glen Ellyn, Ill.) who came to New York City at 20 and made a name in the performance art scene of the ‘70s. Her work, merging music, dance, theater, art and technology, crossed over to the pop scene with the fluke British hit “O Superman” in 1980. Hers is a friendly, quirky aesthetic, which partly accounts for her high profile and longevity in a field of one. She’s the avant-gardist who came out of the cold.

Anderson’s lair is only 10 blocks from ground zero, and although she was out of town Sept. 11, she says the event has radically altered her viewpoint. Along with tales of her experiences trying out various work situations (on an Amish farm and at a Manhattan McDonald’s) and Zen river-rafting, her reactions to it are woven into “Happiness.”

When the compact and soft-spoken Anderson, 54, sits down for an interview, she seems simultaneously present and lost in thought, the same lucid yet dreamy quality that she often brings to her performances. She chooses her studio’s control room, which is packed with sound equipment and the inevitable computer running the industry standard Pro Tools recording program, but she points longingly out the window, noting, “This view is more important than anything else for me.

Question: “Songs and Stories from ‘Moby-Dick,’” your last work, was a real production number, with props, technical elements, cast, and all. Was it necessary for you to unplug after that, to scale back?

Answer: Yes, I usually do something big and then something small. I could not improvise in that piece, not at all. It was like I had to get to a certain B flat at a certain time. I was always aware of the machine I was part of.

Also, it’s really a big project trying to get that kind of financing, commissions together. A lot of that is going around with your hand out, saying, “Please, be interested in this,” and doing your dog and pony show, saying, “Oh, it’s going to look like this and this....” I just wanted to be on my own and see what happens. I love making images. I do miss that. On the other hand, I really appreciate the collaborative process [onstage] in this--it is so bare, there really is a lot more real contact with the audience. I can really feel it much more directly.

Q: How did you start the process of working on “Happiness”?

A: About eight months ago, I began culling stuff for it. I made some weird trips, because I realized I was bored with what I was doing. I needed another point of view. I needed to put myself in uncomfortable places. So that’s what I did.

Another trip [is in] the piece called “The Green River.” It was supposed to be studying the work of the Dogen, the 13th century Japanese Zen master who believed that mountains are aware. This was supposed to be two weeks of total silence, canoeing in Utah. And then our Zen teacher, each evening, would talk about the Dogen. I thought, “Boy, that sounds good.”

I won’t tell you the outcome, but it couldn’t have been more opposite than that. I realized that I run my life on expectations.

It was going to be like a collection of those kinds of things. Then came Sept. 11, and pretty much everything changed for me, on just about every level of my life. It’s very strange. I got back about a week later and was here a few days and then in Europe.

Q: When you came back to New York, did you find a completely changed city?

A: Yeah. When I came back a week later, I stayed for a week. I went down to ground zero every day, sometimes twice a day. It’s about 10 blocks from here. I couldn’t get into my place at first. It was cordoned off. Then it was covered with journalists. I couldn’t get into the door without doing an interview for Japanese TV or somebody else yelling, “You’re Laurie Anderson, come over here.” For a lot of people who live in this neighborhood, they were out, for the second plane, on Greenwich Street. That was the runway. That’s something you never forget. It comes down your street, goes around that apartment building, takes a left and a right.... That made all the difference. Your town, your street.

My biggest reaction was a kind of awe at the beauty of things. I saw it mostly as a kind of opportunity. There was a door that just opened. What am I going to do? I have a chance now to look at things differently. When something of that enormity happens, you do get a chance to really live in the present for a while. Partially, it was because nobody knew what would happen next. We’re not good at making those predictions.

In my own relationships, I realized how much [I was] predicting and rehashing. Even conversations weren’t happening in the moment. I’d be thinking about what I just said or thinking about what I was going to say and not really realizing that I was talking to somebody in real time. Real time became a big deal. It was suddenly much more important.

Already, I’d been colossally disappointed in my mode of working, which again had to do with what I saw as expectations and predictions.

Q: As an artist, you felt there was a predictable pattern you were slipping into?

A: Oh sure. Many artists share that feeling, especially artists in their 50s, I think. I was talking to some of those people--my people--at a benefit the other night. We were talking about how you start something and then people identify you with that, and you keep doing it. It’s hard to get that excited anymore.

I don’t feel that, the lack of excitement, or at least not often. But I do know what they’re talking about, when you say to yourself, “Oh, should I do another one of those? What time is it?”

Q: But it sounds like “Happiness” is a proactive response to that feeling of being static. Is that the idea?

A: Yeah. Also, there’s a lot more personal stuff than I thought. I was shocked when I heard the tape [of a work-in-progress run-through in December]. “What, you’re telling that story? Why would you want to say that?” I’ve used a lot of experiences that I’ve had and conversations that I’ve had in my work, but not quite like this.

One of the pieces is called “A Story About a Story.” It’s about when I broke my back when I was 12. It was always a story that I would tell people if they asked what kind of childhood I had. I had this sort of [she pauses] shtick, this version of what had happened.

Then, when I started thinking about it, I realized I had forgotten most it. I just remembered other things about it, like how silly the doctors were, funny things, anecdotal things.

But what I’d forgotten about was what it sounded like at night. Burn victims were in the hospital. They put all the kids in the same ward. They’d scream all night and then they’d die. It was the sound of children dying. It was something that I’d put somewhere. It was just too horrifying to remember.

After Sept. 11, I was telling that to someone, and probably because of the images from the trade center, of people falling and birds on fire, all this stuff came back to me.

Part of [“Happiness”] is about the stories that you tell yourself, or other people, about who you are.

Q: You’ve often taken on different personas in your work. For “Happiness,” were you assuming different identities in search of material?

A: Well, not so much identities as just taking jobs.

Q: Were people aware of you being Laurie Anderson?

A: Let’s see, I was working in McDonald’s on Canal Street. People I knew came in. I was not disguising myself but just working in uniform, with the little cap. I’d say, “Good morning, welcome to McDonald’s.” I was about to [she winks] blow my cover, until I realized that they didn’t see me. I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I wasn’t there.

I didn’t take it personally. I didn’t say to myself, “Now, I’m suddenly part of the service industry and I’ve become invisible.”

[But] I went in with a very cynical point of view. I was going to look at mass production. How do you make something that appeals to a lot of people, whether it’s hamburgers, CDs or whatever. I make this stuff in hopes that a lot of people like it.

Also, I had some ideas about what a crummy job it would probably be.

I only worked there two weeks, so what do I know? But it was absolutely the opposite of what I expected. People who worked there were--and this is no joke--genuinely happy. Not to say anything about McDonald’s in general, but this one had that feeling of camaraderie and fun. We were proud of what we doing. We were fast. We joked around all the time.

Q: It sounds like you miss it.

A: I do. Also, I was able to give people exactly what they wanted.

Q: That’s a quality that you don’t often get in the arts?

A: No. It’s very fluid. [In a gruff voice,] “That’s not what I ordered. I ordered an opera. This is a potato print.”

Q: You have carved out your own place in culture, touching on elements of performance art and pop and new music and other things. But there remains no easy explanation or categorization for what you do. Is that actually a sign of success, from your viewpoint?

A: You have to think about if you want to be pinned down as one thing or another. It’s hard to create an image that is so concrete and stable. That takes PR people. Nobody’s like that.

I much prefer being able to flit around. It’s just the way I am, from the time I was 5, doing this, doing that. I always wanted the freedom to change my mind and do different things.

Fortunately, my parents always said, “You know what, you don’t to have to decide what you’re going to be, ever. You can be something different every day if you want.”

I’m just doing what they told me do: Do a little of this and a little of that, don’t get trapped.

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“Happiness,” Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m., UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall. $19-35; (805) 893-3535; also, Feb. 9, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $16-$40; (310) 825 2101.

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Josef Woodard is a frequent contributor to Calendar.