This American Life - 45: Media Fringe

Broadcast on: 06 Dec 1996

"From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International." So Sandra thought she knew how to beat the system. She thought she knew how to get her name into the art magazines and be respected and be quoted and be looked up to, just like Ari Anderson. Here's her scheme. She had her piano set up next to the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles at rush hour. And that is like a super congested part of the freeway, and it was on the afternoon of Labor Day weekend on Friday. And you were on the like the median of the freeway there, right? I wanted to be, but I ended up, I couldn't get permission for that, on a parking lot that just abutted the freeway with a third of the amplification they use in U2 concerts. Marshall Stacks, you know, next to me just booming out over like eight lanes of freeway. It got her attention, but not the right kind. Not the Laurie Anderson. Someday you will meet Lou Reed Kind. I had come into this trying to just be a performance artist in the Italian futuristata style. I was in my 20s and reading those kinds of materials about those types of artists, which always makes you want to run out and do guerrilla art. And so that's what I thought I was doing, but in fact after I did the first event it became this huge media blitz with People Magazine and all that kind of stuff. There were jokes about you on the Tonight Show. Exactly. And CNN, AP News wire, whatever. And all this brings us to the theme of today's program, from WB, Easy in Chicago, It's This American Life from Ira Glass. Each weekend our show, we choose some topic, invite various writers, performers and documentary producers to tackle that topic. But in our program, four stories about people struggling at the very margins, at the very edges of our nation's media, music, infotainment, news, infotainment, industry, complex. Act one, had to get famous. Act two, whoring in commercial radio news. It's a story by Scott Carrier. Act three, doing a personal act for money. Act four, lifestyles of the rich and famous. Stay with us. Act one, had to get famous. So Sandra Singlow is now our writer. Now she's a regular contributor here on This American Life. Now she's author of a new book. Now she was a star of a one woman show that got rave reviews this summer. Back in the 1980s, before she became the master of all media, she lived this little parable of fame in America. After her first media success, after she did the big thing by the highway and was featured in every media outlet, everybody who she knew became an expert and told her to hire a publicist. A publicist would cost $1,000 a month. And Sandra thought about this and figured she could get just as much publicity she thought. If she would just give away $1,000 in one dollar bills as she played the piano. And to test this scientific theory, she schemed out a second public event which she called self promotion. She intended this title ironically. The event was supposed to be a critique of self promotion. But nobody took it that way. So of course, in fact, a crowd did appear. All the news stations showed up and did this actually very beautiful piece of videotape of me playing the piano. And then my assistant who was handcuffed to his briefcase through the $1,000 and $1 bills over me. And they floated in the air and you saw these hands in the air reaching up. And then the wind shifted and carried the bills about two feet the other way. And all the hands shifted after the bills, much like underwater sea creatures. It was really quite beautiful. And I got, in fact, a bit trampled, which was my point. I thought it was a morality tale in Los Angeles that if you pay people to come and see you, they've just come to see the money. So when the money comes, they will grab for the money and the artist has trampled underneath. Do you think that actually people got that message? No. And I knew for sure that they didn't get it because driving from that event, I heard like a live K and X news radio broadcast

Transcription truncated.