As part of its Midnight Moment program, which features "cutting-edge creative content" every night from 11:57 p.m. until midnight, the Times Square Alliance is presenting a Midnight Moment-edition of artist/dog whisperer Laurie Anderson's documentary Heart of a Dog this month. Tomorrow night, Monday, January 4th, Anderson will be on hand for a special live performance for canines and humans alike.
According to a press release: "This unique performance by Laurie Anderson will be transmitted to 'silent disco' headphones for humans and low-decibel speakers for dogs. Headphone distribution will start at 11:00 pm (first-come, first-served) and the public is encouraged to bring their own dogs. The performance will begin at 11:30 pm."
Heart of a Dog is a collection of stories about dogs, time, family, love, memory and death. In the middle of the film there is a sequence from “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” that describes the transition of energy and consciousness at the time of death. In this portion of the film, which is the section that will be shown in Times Square, Anderson creates a visual song, filled with a wild collage of images. The video changes point of view frequently, shifting from a dog’s eye view to the lens of a surveillance camera to free floating pictures that move through your mind in dreams and memories.
Dozens of advertisers in Times Square devote their billboards to showing the Midnight Moment.
Anderson said, "I love Times Square. It’s a dream. Desire, speed, the explosions of color, patterns and energy. What a great way to start the New Year! The ball drops and “Heart of a Dog” leaps onto all those massive screens at three minutes to midnight. Who could have predicted the unraveling dreams of my dog would be magnified up there like this? And sound too!"
Besides Anderson, NYPD K-9 handlers and the K-9 dogs themselves will attend tomorrow night's event.
A European TV network commissioned Anderson to make a film, and she created Heart of a Dog. The movie screened at the New York Film Festival and is on the short-list for Oscar feature documentaries.
NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis praised the movie, writing that it's:
partly a meditation on loss and love that begins with the death of [Anderson's] mother and moves on to include the deaths of Ms. Anderson’s talented and tuneful rat terrier, Lolabelle; her friend, the brilliant artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978); and her husband, Lou Reed. Mr. Reed, who died in 2013, hovers over 'Heart of a Dog,' his face surfacing intermittently and fleetingly, wavering into visibility like an image that’s caught behind glass or reflected in a mirror, a distancing that suggests that he is present and not present at the same time. (One of his most moving appearances occurs during the final credits.) 'Every love story is a ghost story,' Ms. Anderson says at one point, quoting David Foster Wallace, yet another lingering spirit.
Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins explained, "Laurie’s film brings our collected memories into the New Year through a layered and dense moving photo album of our minds."
