Laurie Anderson was once called a sellout for signing with Warner Bros. and bringing her art world aesthetic to the mainstream. Twenty years later, Brian Eno creates sounds for Microsoft, Mario Cuomo hawks Doritos, and it's Anderson who is refusing the Absolut ads. As she gets set to introduce her new performance work, Happiness, to Los Angeles audiences, Anderson talks with LA Weekly's Judith Lewis about pop culture, fast food, Sept. 11 and the virtues of useless art.
With a terse note, Philadelphia City Paper kills its serialized novel, Transit of Venus by Anonymous D, because the local Fox affiliate threatened a lawsuit. The novel about a young woman's experiences as a TV news neophyte apparently cut too close to the Fox bone. The chapters published to date have been removed from the newspapers' Web site.
The bare-knuckled battle between Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in the land of Starbucks is laid bare by Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer John Marshall. He looks into whether two alt-weeklies can survive in a city the size of Seattle and whether the Stranger's "performance-art" journalistic style can knock out the more upscale, serious Weekly.
