Laurie Anderson The Cultural Ambassador Lyrics

Anyway, I was in Israel as a kind of cultural ambassador and there were lots of press conferences scheduled around the performances. 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 vey 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!