Song information On this page you can find the lyrics of the song The Cultural Ambassador, artist - Laurie Anderson. Album song The Ugly One With The Jewels And Other Stories, in the genre
Date of issue: 28.07.2008
Record label: Warner
Song language: English
The Cultural Ambassador |
Anyway, I was in Israel as a kind of cultural ambassador |
and there were lots of press conferences scheduled around the performances. |
And the journalists usually started things off by asking about the avant-garde. |
«So, what’s so good about new?"they'd ask. |
«Well, new is… interesting.» |
«And what, they would say, is so good about interesting?» |
«Well, interesting is, you know… |
it’s… interesting. |
It’s like… being awake, |
you know, I’m treading water now.» |
«And what is so good about being awake?"they'd say. |
Finally I got the hang of this: never answer a question in Israel, |
always answer by asking another question. |
But the Israelis were very curious |
about the Gulf War and what Americans had thought about it, |
and I tried to think of a good question to ask and answer to this, |
but what was really on my mind was that the week before |
I had myself been testing explosives in a parking lot in Tel Aviv. |
Now this happened because I had brought some small stage bombs to Israel |
as props for this performance |
and the Israeli promoter was very interested in them. |
And it turned out that he was on weekend duty on one of the bomb squads, |
and bombs were also something of a hobby during the week. |
So I said: |
«Look, you know, these bombs are nothing special, just, just a little smoke.» |
And he said: |
«Well, we can get much better things for you.» |
And I said: |
«No really, these are fine…» |
And he said: |
«No, but it should be big, theatrical. |
It should make an impression, |
I mean you really just the right bomb.» |
And so one morning he arranged to have about fifty small bombs |
delivered to a parking lot, |
and since he looked on it as a sort of special surprise favor, |
I couldn’t really refuse, |
so we are on this parking lot testing the bombs, |
and after the first few explosions, |
I found I was really getting pretty… interested. |
They all had very different characteristics: |
some had fiery orange tails, |
and made these low paah, paah, paah, popping sound; |
others exploded mid-air and left long smoky, slinky trails, |
and he had several of each kind in case I needed to review them all at the end, |
and I’m thinking: |
Here I am, a citizen of the world’s largest arms supplier, |
setting off bombs with the world’s second largest arms customer, |
and I’m having a great time! |
So even though the diplomatic part of the trip wasn’t going so well, |
at least I was getting some instruction in terrorism. |
And it reminded me of something in a book by Don DeLillo |
about how terrorists are the only true artists left, |
because they’re the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people. |
And the other thing it reminded me of, |
were all the attempts during the Gulf War to outwit the terrorists, |
and I especially remember an interesting list of tips |
devised by the US embassy in Madrid, |
and these tips were designed for Americans |
who found themselves in war-time airports. |
The idea was not to call ourselves to the attention of the numerous foreign |
terrorists |
who were presumably lurking all over the terminal, |
so the embassy tips were a list of mostly don’ts. |
Things like: |
don’t wear a baseball cap; |
don’t wear a sweat shirt with the name of an American university on it; |
don’t wear Timberlands with no socks; |
don’t chew gum; |
don’t yell «Ethel, our plane is leaving! |
I mean it’s weird when your entire culture |
can be summed up in eight giveaway characteristics. |
And during the Gulf War I was traveling around Europe with a lot of equipment, |
and all the airports were full of security guards |
who would suddenly point to a suitcase and start yelling: |
«Whose bag is this? |
I wanna know right now who owns this bag.» |
And huge groups of passengers would start fanning out for the bag, |
just running around in circles like a Skud missile on its way in, |
and I was carrying a lot of electronics |
so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in |
and demonstrating how it all worked, |
and I guessed I did seem a little fishy; |
a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names |
like Atom Smasher, |
and so it took a while to convince them that they weren’t some kind of |
espionage system. |
So I’ve done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts |
for small groups of detectives and customs agents |
and I’d have to keep setting all this stuff up |
and they’d listen for a while and they’d say: |
«So uh, what’s this?» |
And I’d pull out something like this filter and say: |
«Now this is what I’d like to think of as the voice of Authority.» |
And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, |
you know, about various forms of control, and they would say: |
«Now, why would you want to talk like that?» |
And I’d look around at the SWAT and the undercover agents |
and the dogs and the radio in the corner, |
tuned to the Superbowl coverage of the war. |
And I’d say: |
«Take a wild guess.» |
Finally of course, I got through, |
with this after all American-made equipment, |
and the customs agents were all talking about the effectiveness, |
no the beauty, the elegance, of the American strategy of pinpoint bombing. |
The high tech surgical approach, |
which was being reported on CNN |
as something between grand opera and the Superbowl, |
like the first reports before the blackout |
when TV was live and everything was heightened, |
and it was so… euphoric. |