Before reading his New York Times Magazine profile of legendary, uncategorizable artist Laurie Anderson for the great podcast app, Audm, Sam Anderson shared a series of questions Anderson asks herself to figure out whether a piece she’s working on is good or not.
We agree with Sam Anderson that it is “great criteria for proceeding in life with whatever you’re doing“.
Is it complicated enough?
Is it simple enough?
Is it crazy enough?
Is it beautiful enough?
Is it stupid enough?
Anderson’s scope of work over her life is so vast, she truly is uncategorizable. We offer a tiny glimpse of her range: At top, “Oh Superman”, which she recorded in 1979 in a studio she set up in her hallway, with a background beat that is entirely her voice, heavily-processed. Below, a snippet from “Spending the War Without You”, a Zoom lecture Anderson produced in October, 2021 for the Norton Lectures at Harvard.
*If you are tired of over-produced and fake-chatty podcasts, we highly recommend Audm, an app that reads aloud feature stories and poetry from excellent publications. It allows us “read” from a wide range of periodicals we don’t have subscriptions to, while we cook dinner.
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