i thought i had already worked through this and put it all behind me. but maybe not. when i was an art school student, i would get very excited about ideas i thought were new … only to discover that Laurie Anderson had already done very similar things, much earlier. it happened again and again.

i have a vague recollection of one of my early sound pieces–performing both parts of a very mundane, superficial phone conversation, with heavy processing of the voice on the other side of the line. i was really pleased with it when i left the sound studio.

but then, immediately after, i went to the library to listen to an album of works by contemporary women composers, assigned to us as required listening for the sound class. one of the works was Laurie Anderson’s New York Social Life, which captured everything I was striving to evoke in my sound piece, only far more clever and much better performed. as I was listening, i was reading her brief bio on the liner notes, which is when I discovered that we shared the same birthday. and i thought, oh great, she’s even chosen June 5 as the date to enter this realm,  eleven years before i could get to it. Perhaps it is my destiny to stand in her shadow. Or perhaps it is her destiny to stand in my foreshadow.

after reading her bio, i thought it might be wise if i just avoided her presence, evaded her influence, from then on. which, of course was both futile and undesirable. o, what a fool i was! But then yesterday, I came across a Laurie Anderson music video from 2011 that was posted on the wonderful Eye to Eye U & I blog. And my heart sank when i discovered eerie similarities with my recent video, The Un Known (2013), which i had convinced myself was my swan song as an artist.

actually it is a good thing i had not seen the Laurie Anderson video prior to making my video, otherwise my swan song would have occurred at least one year earlier. i wonder what thoughts you might have about this. (if your screen is large enough, it’s interesting to play both videos at the same time.)