Laurie Anderson
Frames for the Pictures
I had this dream...and, in it, my mother was sitting there cutting out pictures of hamsters from magazines. In some of the pictures, the hamsters are pets, and some are just scenes where hamsters are somewhere in the background. She's got a whole pile of these cedar chips--you know the kind, the kind from the bottoms of hamster cages. She's gluing them into the frames for the pictures. She glues them together, and frames the pictures, and then hangs them over the fireplace--that's more or less her method. And suddenly I realize that this is just her way of suggesting to me that I should become a structuralist filmmaker--which I had, you know, planned to do anyway