To the uninitiated, Laurie Anderson’s career looks like a series of contradictions and improbabilities—and, in truth, that’s what it is. The renowned performance artist, who came of age during the Seventies heyday of New York’s downtown art and music scene, had a pop hit in 1981 with “O Superman,” an eight-and-a-half-minute halfsung, half-Vocoder fictional telephone conversation whose main “hook” (if you could even call it that) was borrowed from a Jules Massenet opera.
The thematic concerns and formal strategies of “O Superman” are apparent in Anderson’s new feature-length work, The Heart of a Dog, an incredibly wise yet never maudlin meditation on loss, technology, terrorism, surveillance, family, love, and Eastern philosophy. In her unmistakable oratorical style—characterized by a lilting, cooing extension of syllables that you’ll either love or hate—Anderson narrates…
