Earlier this month I saw Laurie Anderson perform in Kansas City. Her show made a deep impression on me, and something that rang in my head with particular force was her quotation from an old movie: "There's trouble out at the mine! There's trouble out at the mine!" She ran her voice through her "voice of authority" Vocoder, so that it took on dark, desperate weight: "Patriots, citizens! There's trouble out at the mine!" I haven't been able to shake the memory of it, for obvious reasons.
