Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave - An International Archive of ...

tempera atop glued-on dogshit at Los Angeles' dismal La Luz De Jesus gallery. The new venue'sslightly rude, inanely pretentious, but still an acceptable ego indulgence that disports outsideone's gold-lined sandbox, uncharted territory for whomever mommy and daddy bankrolledthrough Tulane or UCLA. The melodies can be found on mainstream music stations,microscopically sanitized for mass consumption, gimmicked for pseudo-sophistication, perfumedwith pheromones formulated to engorge the passionate agitation of A&R monkeys: gelt. Art, afterall, must serve a purpose. Hence, what better mission than this?The Leprachaunette halts almost before beginning, broadly winking slyly, so we know she'staoistically crushing that evil ol' ego, babbling about boho visitations to streetside palmists,rendering revelations that, in former lives, she was a cow, then a bird, and, later, hundreds andhundreds of incarnations as rabbis until this very moment, this lifetime, her first go-round as a,ta-daa! woman. Ego, thy name is Tinkerbelle. The multi-levelled crassnesses needn't becommented upon, but one again sees exactly what the film really is: shallow self-referentialism.Were some new book to properly catalogue the avant-garde, this fluff wouldn't merit the first letterof the first word in the opening sentence. How did the refrain go? "Show-biz kids making moviesof themselves, you know they don't give a..."Another spastic dance follows as we're tortured by an aimless syndrum exercise: theepiphanistically rabbinical transmorph's dressage has been implanted with responsivetouch-points kicking up a synth somewhere off-stage. She taps various parts and we hear a fewseconds of electronica drum soloing, the equal of what butter-faced, suit-and-tied, tub o' gooflunkies inflict on the rubes at any NAMM show. The audience, predictably, goes nuts. Thatdisplay segues into a game-show parody, wherein The Selfless One trots out her collegeescholastica Espanol, launching into a brief round of "What's More Macho?" for no apparentreason other than solidarity, from a laughable distance, with Andrea Dworkin. The elements areabout as subtle as flying hammers wrapped in barbed wire.One might think there'd be nothing redeeming about this mess, given the above. Not true. Homeof the Brave, a catcall title from one carny to a bunch of others, is calculatingly chart-oriented, asseamless as a Bob James jazz-lite release, innocuously exploratory within predictable borders,and, inside those same limits, quite good. Whether that's complimentary is another matter. Belewambles out some of his pre-Crimsonite stylings and there's sufficient progression peeking out tosatisfy the bubble-gumming segment of that slice of the consuming public. In fact, it comes as noshock that there's at least one song for most every taste on the charts. Paradoxical? C'mon,wasn't Breton's real mission a matter of end-run capitalism, pre-MTV 'tude merchandising?Perhaps you'll find in my words a sense of provocateuring. Well, sirrah, so be it. Our hostessmakes so bold as to invoke Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and, if she's studying Fassbinder's inanecatalogue, well, she must be avant-garde! yawn Think of this farrago as Sominex for art hags, alullaby for the jangled nerves of a yuppified audience fressing over stocks and BMWs, and you'llhave it pared to a fare-thee-well. Home's a kinetic uptown exhibit of trend-of-the-moment tripe artfutilely attempting the divide between utter mediocrity and backwater incoherence. When youcognize that Anderson isn't the avant-goddess she's laughably promoted to be, something sheotherwise semi-daintily sweats to abet, you can settle back into a cynical enjoyment of the film'smany quasi-well-crafted failures. Discard the A-V sobriquet and understand it's a euphemism forNew Age music stabbed slightly out of focus, but... pay to see it on-stage? No, 'tis merely agrown-up version of little girl puppet shows. Though the savvy wage slave might retain the video,tickling up curmudgeonly glee from time to time, music for the macaw, neon crassness for thosetimes when Kenny G and Yanni just aren't cutting it, even the obstreperous have to admit thatsuch ventures are clever to a miniscule degree, a weird soma when all other sedatives fail.That's success of a sort...isn't it?Check out the rest of PERFECT SOUND FOREVERMAIN PAGE ARTICLES STAFF/FAVORITE MUSIC LINKS E-MAIL