In Which It Hurts In Isolation Or With Others

Dream of a World Without Pain

by ALICIA PUGLIONESI

Horace Wells was a dentist in Connecticut in 1844 when the circus came to town. Wells watched as an audience volunteer inhaled laughing gas and then “jumped about” violently without feeling any pain. Soon after this, Wells had a fellow dentist pull one of his teeth while he was high on laughing gas, and he too felt no pain. To feel nothing during a medical procedure was unheard of.

Wells lived in a world infinitely more painful than our own, which is painful enough. People tolerated amputations, wounds, festering abscesses, all manner of gynecological and obstetrical misfortunes. Often they took their pain with equanimity because there was nothing to be done. Advertisements that promised painless procedures were a polite fiction papering the surface of a vast sea of futility and resignation. Surgery, when attempted, was a violent struggle.

Both laughing gas (nitrous oxide) and ether were wildly popular in the 1840s as recreational drugs, but Wells proposed that nitrous be put to nobler use as an anesthetic – medicine's first realistic hope for preventing pain. Wells tried heroically to spread the word about laughing gas, preaching that relief from pain should be “as free as the air.” Perhaps because the gas was identified with recreational drug use, doctors didn't take Wells, a lowly dentist, seriously.

There came a moment of truth: in 1844 Wells was challenged to demonstrate his miracle anesthetic before an audience of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital. It would be a tooth extraction, as before. Wells drugged his patient and grabbed the rotten tooth with the forceps. The patient began thrashing and screaming, and pandemonium broke out in the auditorium. The audience shouted “Humbug!” and "This is a hospital, not a circus!" The patient, a large adult male, hadn't received enough laughing gas to numb him.

Wells fled the auditorium, humiliated. His medical career was ruined by the fiasco, but he couldn't give up on the idea of pain relief. He had glimpsed the possibility of a better world; an evangelical spirit drove him. He began experimenting on himself with chloroform, an inhaled anesthetic at low doses and a poison at higher doses, soon becoming addicted. He spiraled into poverty and mental derangement.

One day, in a burst of religious fervor, Wells threw acid at a couple of prostitutes in the street and was arrested. In jail, as the chloroform wore off, he realized what he had done, and in anguish he took his own life. Wells' widow remarked that the discovery of anesthesia had been to her and her family “an unspeakable evil.”

William Morton, a somewhat unscrupulous dental school dropout, was Horace Wells' partner in dental practice from 1842 to 1843 (he rarely stayed in one place for long). While working for Wells, Morton began courting the daughter of a wealthy high-society family; the family refused to let them marry unless Morton quit dentistry and become a “real doctor.”

In short order, he ditched Wells and entered Harvard Medical School in 1844, the same year that Wells took his nitrous-oxide-anesthesia concept public with disastrous results. Morton was sitting in the audience that day; he knew why Wells' laughing gas had failed, and he knew that whoever succeeded at finding a more powerful anesthetic agent would be showered with fame and fortune. Soon after, Morton attended a chemistry lecture where the professor, Charles T. Jackson, demonstrated the anesthetic properties of a gas called ether. Ether was readily available for laboratory use, and Morton began testing it out on patients, performing a painless tooth extraction in 1846.

The scene returns to Massachusetts General Hospital, where two years earlier Wells had suffered his great humiliation. A skeptical audience had gathered for another trial of a supposed miracle anesthesia. Morton etherized the patient, who lay insensible as his skin was sliced open and a tumor cut out from his throat. This was regarded as the first anesthetic surgery - “it's no humbug,” the crowd murmured – and the surgical theater became known as the Ether Dome. Morton dropped out of school for a second time to promote his discovery.

But he wasn't satisfied with introducing pain-free surgery to the world; William Morton wanted his slice of the pie. He refused to reveal the substance that he had used in the Ether Dome demonstration, and filed a patent for an anesthetic that he called “Letheon” (named, disconcertingly, after the river Lethe which circled the underworld of Greek myth). Everyone knew by then that Morton's anesthetic was just plain ether, and his fellow doctors chastised him for trying to profit from the pain of others.

The patent on Letheon was impossible to enforce, and ether went into widespread use, but Morton never gave up his quest for exclusive credit as the discoverer of anesthesia. He dropped dead in Central Park in 1868 after a twenty-year struggle to win recognition. It was a hot day in July; Morton was debt-ridden and under enormous stress. His death from “congestion of the brain” also may have coincided with his reading an article in the Atlantic that credited the discovery of anesthesia to Morton's enemy, Charles T. Jackson.

Charles T. Jackson, a chemist, geologist, and sometime Harvard professor, had trouble letting things go. When Morton, his former student, announced the discovery of “Letheon,” Jackson immediately realized that the idea of ether anesthetic was lifted straight from his chemistry lecture. Here, of course, certain details are fuzzy: Jackson never applied his idea experimentally – it was more of a passing observation – and he never put it on paper or filed for a patent. But he did meet privately with Morton soon before Morton's first experiment; what information passed between them during this meeting is hard to say, though Jackson claimed that he instructed Morton on the surgical use of ether. However, ether only became an anesthetic when Morton began marketing it that way, which Jackson would perhaps never have done, lacking an entrepreneurial streak.

Jackson's specialty, though was bitter scientific priority disputes. He also claimed to have discovered stomach acid, guncotton, and the telegraph, and his questionable conduct in these disputes led his enemies to characterize him as bizarre, eccentric, even psychopathic. Once Charles T. Jackson decided that you had stolen an idea from him, you were not likely to hear the end of it in your lifetime. He had powerful friends and a seemingly inexhaustible zeal for prosecution. However, the anesthesia battle proved too bitter even for Jackson.

In June of 1873, an exhausted and depressed Jackson was walking through Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. There is a peculiar legend about what happened that day: Jackson supposedly stumbled upon William Morton's gravestone, where he read he inscription: “Inventor and Revealer of Anaesthetic Inhalation. By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled. Before whom in all time surgery was agony. Since whom science has control of pain.”

Police found Jackson later that afternoon, ranting and incoherent, and shipped him to the McLean asylum in Somerville, where he died seven years later. Although Jackson did go insane in 1873 while walking in Mount Auburn Cemetery, this account of the cause is probably a fabrication.

Wells, Morton and Jackson didn't discover anything new; they were fighting over credit for a novel application of existing substances. It's no coincidence that they all knew each other and shared ideas about anesthetics – they were part of a small coterie of medical men entertaining the new and radical idea that no one should have to suffer to be cured. Even if there was a clear-cut winner (it would be Crawford Long, an obscure Georgia surgeon who started using ether anesthesia in 1842) we probably wouldn't give much thought to these musty would-be-patriarchs who fought so bitterly for a place in popular memory.

It doesn't seem to matter much who discovered what because the idea immediately became obvious: of course we should sleep through surgery and remember nothing, of course the worst can be avoided. The project of eliminating pain entails also eliminating the memory of pain, a sprawling history of helplessness and resignation, and forgetting the misfortunes that made it possible up to the instant of waking. All that's left to Wells, Morton, and Jackson is the perversity of having suffered so much in the name of ending suffering, a raw deal, really.

In 1942, Preston Sturges directed a biographical film about the discovery of anesthesia, which he wanted to call “Great Without Glory.” Paramount held up the theatrical release of the movie for two years, re-editing it into an incoherent slapstick comedy called “The Great Moment." The film was a commercial and critical failure.

Alicia Puglionesi is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Margery Kempe. She tumbls here.

"Strange All" - Thank You (mp3)

"Can't/Can" - Thank You (mp3)

In Which We Grow Hoarse Without A Lung

This Creature

by ALICIA PUGLIONESI

Margery Kempe wrote one of the earliest autobiographies in the English language, except that she didn't write it. Kempe dictated her life story to a scribe because, like most medieval women, she was illiterate. This resulted in a number of strange effects, the most jarring of which is that the scribe replaced her first-person “I” with the phrase “this creature” throughout the text. It's possible that Kempe spoke in the third person as "this creature." Some scholars suspect that she was secretly literate and wrote the book herself, taking pains with the story of the male scribe and the elimination of personal pronouns in order to evade persecution.

Other scholars question whether Kempe existed at all because her story is so profoundly strange.

Already this creature leads us into a tangle of difficulties: was Margery Kempe a radical who cannily manipulated religious and social conventions in order to live a life beyond the limits set for women of her time? You wouldn't think so looking at her. In her book she sometimes seems like a wild, frightened animal in our modern sense of “creature." Or a creature in the sense of a monster, suddenly strange and frightening to herself, desperately seeking an escape into the divine. All creature really means in the fifteenth century, though, is a thing that God created, and over which he has dominion. The Book of Margery Kempe is about a normal woman who believes that God chose her – because of her lack of any special merit – to demonstrate how his divine love transcends all human conventions. The question, of course, is whether the bulldozing of those conventions was God's idea or Kempe's, and whether we could ever tell the difference.

People have wondered what was wrong with Margery Kempe for centuries: was she insane, possessed, divinely-inspired, or incredibly canny? She was known for weeping uncontrollably at inappropriate times – like in the middle of a church service, or while traveling with strangers, or while trying to persuade a local mob that she wasn't a heretic who should be burned at the stake. Kempe didn't see her incessant crying as a problem. She thought it was a gift from God – God had chosen her for this form of penance, a mark of difference and divine favor. She seems to have spent a lot of her time sitting or lying down and weeping for the soul of mankind.

a lively concern with death

This was the late fourteenth century, a time of some political tension and much religious strife in Europe. The Catholic Church was working hard to bring its authority to bear on heretical sects like the Lollards that claimed direct communication with God. The Church found that communication with God was a particularly slippery thing to regulate. A complex set of rules and hierarchies mediated Catholic access to the divine, but the religion was based on stories of ordinary people receiving unexpected revelations. This contradiction was becoming a sticking point. Margery Kempe is a footnote in the long and messy run-up to an even longer and messier schism; her hedge was that none of her words or actions were her own, a common-enough maneuver for speaking truth to power.

Medieval religious devotion was also passing through a sort of ecstatic sentimental phase around this time. Passion and weeping, fantastic love and impossible longing, became popular expressive paradigms, to the consternation of the Church which just wanted people to behave in an orderly fashion.

Since this “affective piety” was coded feminine, some interesting gender issues surfaced – there's talk of suckling at Jesus' teat and quasi-sexual encounters with the godhead. Revelations about the ecstatic nature of God's love came from a new class of religious mystics, many of them women cloistered in religious orders. Marie d'Oignes, St. Bridget of Sweden, Clare of Montefalco, and Julian of Norwich were popular subjects of the female sacred biography genre – texts usually written by male clerics which authorized the spiritual experiences of holy women. Because these women were nuns they could often read and write, but their stories had to be told by men in order to assimilate material that could otherwise pose a danger to the Church.

can I help you with that ma'am?

Margery Kempe claimed never to have read any of the mystic texts popular during her lifetime, although she would at least have heard some of them read aloud. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Bishop's Lynn, a town a hundred miles north of London. The mature Kempe describes her young self as “set in great pomp and pride of the world.” This means she liked to wear fashionable clothes. She was never "content with the goods that God had sent her...but ever desired more and more.” This means that she had an entrepreneurial streak; she ran a brewery and a grist mill. This seems like a medieval approximation of our modern feminine ideal: a woman who runs her own local, independent business and looks good doing it.

When she was twenty, Kempe married a local merchant and quickly got pregnant. The pregnancy was rocky – she was sick and bedridden, and after a difficult birth she “despaired of her life, thinking that she might not live.” Fearing death, Kempe called for a priest and tried to confess to him a dark secret. Keep in mind that matters of Catholic dogma and heresy were very, very serious for ordinary people in the Middle Ages: Kempe's dark secret was that “she was ever hindered by her enemy, the devil, evermore saying to her that...she needed no confession but could do penance by herself alone, and all should be forgiven.”

She had arrived, on her own, at the heretical belief that one could deal directly with God without the church as an intermediary. This was so heretical that the priest wouldn't even hear Kempe out – he cut her off in the middle of her deathbed confession. Without a confession Kempe knew that she was doomed to Hell for all eternity. At this point, she went completely nuts.

no confession? too bad.

Or as she describes it: “This creature went out of her mind and was wonderfully vexed and labored with spirits for half a year, eight weeks, and some odd days. And in this time she saw, she thought, devils open their mouths, all inflamed with burning flames of fire...and [they] bade her that she should forsake her faith...she slandered her husband, her friends, and her own self...she knew no virtue nor goodness...she would have killed herself many a time with her stirrings, and have been damned with them in hell...save she was bound and kept with strength both day and night so that she might not have her will.”

Kempe was tied up in the basement for six months. This was a common medieval strategy for handling what we would call mental illness – modern readers have diagnosed her with everything from schizophrenia to postpartum depression. Finally, one day she had an ecstatic vision in which Christ appeared beside her and ordered her not to forsake him, “and anon the creature was stabled in her wits and in her reason as well as ever she was before.” Kempe's servants untied her and she vowed to devote her life to piety and prayer in thanks for her miraculous recovery. Except that she really liked nice clothes and money, and having sex with her husband. She basically went back to business as usual.

Only after her brewery and grain mill failed and she'd given birth to ten more children did Kempe have another mystical vision ordering her to forsake the things of this world and devote herself to Christ. She interpreted her commercial failure as God's punishment for pride and covetousness. And she wanted to interpret the voice in her head as the voice of God. This time, perhaps with less to lose, Kempe embarked on a mystical odyssey that would take her from Bishop's Lynn to London to Jerusalem, often penniless and at the mercy of suspicious strangers.

When she started weeping uncontrollably in public and preaching about the joy of heaven, her neighbors suggested that she was either mad or possessed by the devil. Kempe, herself fearing that this might be the case, sought explanations for her strange experiences. She consulted the female mystic Dame Julian of Norwich and many other ecclesiastical experts, all of whom reassured her of the authenticity of her visions. She worked her ecclesiastical connections hard – perhaps aware of the precariousness of her position, she shored up support wherever possible.

The biggest obstacle to Kempe's career as a mystic was her status as a married woman. At that point, the Church was advocating celibacy as the highest ideal for all of its followers – everyone who wanted to win God's love and forgiveness was supposed to give up sex. Previous female mystics had been celibate nuns, or widows who became celibate nuns, or virgins forced into marriage who got their husbands to take vows of celibacy before the deal was consummated. Virginity was the centerpiece of female holiness, but Kempe had been popping out babies for years and wasn't able to stop as long as her husband claimed his legal rights over her. She cut a deal that epitomizes her strange intermingling of sacred calling and worldly savvy: she got her husband to sign a vow of marital chastity in exchange for her paying off all his debts.

Even with a piece of paper certifying her (renewed) chastity, Kempe was a tough sell for many of her countrymen. People complained about her flamboyant weeping and wailing, accusing her of overacting. Kempe considered their hatred another test that God wanted her to endure – the more people scorned her, the more highly she would be rewarded in heaven. It seems like she was genuinely difficult to be around – her fellow pilgrims ditched her on the way to Jerusalem, and clerics back in England kicked her out of services because of her disruptive weeping. Her chaste husband, a remarkably loyal supporter of her work, tended to make himself scarce when Kempe started a scene in the public square.

There was still suspicion that Kempe “had the devil in her.” She carried on extensive conversations with God, Christ, and various saints, who she describes as speaking directly to her mind or soul, but the trick of medieval demonology is that demons could masquerade as holy figures in order to plant seeds of evil. Most of the ecclesiastical experts who Kempe consulted chose to interpret her visions through the lens of divine revelation, but many laypeople assailed her motivations as selfish, and her voices as demonic. Madness wasn't off the table either: one friar banned Kempe from his sermons on the grounds that she was not having visions, but rather suffered from a mental disease.

ways to be mistaken for a witchThe thing is that Kempe could be awfully convincing. Claiming illiteracy, she impressed religious authorities by reciting obscure Biblical passages and offering exegeses. She made accurate prophesies and fielded theological queries. Many ordinary Catholics accepted Kempe as a holy person and paid her to weep (copiously) for the salvation of their souls. Kempe won for herself freedoms and intellectual possibilities that were completely off-limits for most women of her time. Just in terms of mobility, she made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visited scholars and mystics all over England, when most women weren't allowed to leave their villages without the permission of husbands and church officials. At times she publicly criticized the Church for corruption, and urged women to leave their husbands and become brides of Christ.

To call Kempe's career subversive, though, would be to overlook the very real affective power of faith in medieval life. Maybe she got something she wanted – freedom to think and travel, freedom from endless childbearing – but she was also tormented by desire for what she had given up. The “things of this world” were the things that had offered her the most satisfaction; she particularly struggled with the demands of chastity. Her visions were sometimes terrifying and visceral, and she describes these traumatic episodes as tests of her love for God. Perhaps the deeply Catholic worldview of her age drove Kempe to a life of torment and self-denial, perhaps it equipped her to make sense of destabilizing psychological experiences.  For a lowly creature who had surrendered her will to God, she managed to leave a highly personal record of her interior world – Kempe's voice is incredibly rich, simultaneously familiar and strange. This richness of voice may be all we need to know about her.

Alicia Puglionesi is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the Personal Pelvic Viewer. She tumbls here.

"God Treats You Right" - Tonetta (mp3)

"Crucify Me" - Tonetta (mp3)

"I'll Remain As I Am" - Tonetta (mp3) 

 

In Which We Entertain The Opinion Of The Inventor

Lone Female at Home

by ALICIA PUGLIONESI

In 2009, William Banning Vail III, from Bothell, Washington, won a United States Patent for a device called the Personal Pelvic Viewer, or PPV. It's basically a camera that you stick up your vagina to see what's going on in there – the same thing that happens at a gynecological exam. Except the operative principle of the PPV is that you shouldn't count on your gynecologist. You shouldn't trust anyone until you've seen it for yourself.

The invention is meant to provide “methods and apparatus for the lone female at home” to detect any number of gynecological aberrations: infection, cervical cancer, menstrual irregularities, foreign objects. The camera hooks up to a television, so you can watch the inside of your vagina on your high-definition flat screen, alone, at home. The phrase “lone female at home” recurs fifteen times in Vail's fifty-one page patent. Self-knowledge is important, you can't argue with that, but how did we get here, lying on the floor, legs splayed, staring at our vaginal walls on a TV screen? The lone female at home.

a clumsy pre-PPV camera

Vail has a pretty good explanation, which he includes in his patent documents because, why not? As a casual peruser of patents, I found his sudden vehemence unexpected.

On page five, under the heading, “Description of the Preferred Embodiments,” he points to a grisly photograph of a woman's infected cervix. “Just look at the photograph,” he implores. “It is the opinion of the inventor that if the woman had been able to inspect her own uterus, that she could have spotted infection turning a healthy-looking uterus into what is observed.” The infection in this photograph was caused by the Dalkon Shield, an ill-conceived intrauterine device from the 1970s, notorious for its deadly side-effects. The Personal Pelvic Viewer patent is from 2009, though. What beef does Vail have with the Dalkon Shield, long-ago discredited and consigned to medicine's hall of infamous failures?

Vail goes on to recite what sounds like the standard Dalkon Shield horror story. It's 1975 and a male doctor inserts a Dalkon Shield into a patient; the doctor refuses to remove it when the woman complains of severe pain. Finally the woman seeks a different, female doctor who removes the device, but by that time it's too late. The damage to the woman's uterus causes endometriosis, and the same male doctor who refused to remove the Shield performs a hysterectomy to cure her debilitating pain. The woman is named Marilyn L. Vail. William Banning Vail III offers no hints as to his relationship with Marilyn L. Vail; maybe that would be too personal for a patent application, but it's already gotten pretty personal by this point and surely the people at the patent office want to know as badly as I do whether Marilyn is William's wife, and whether his deep concern for women's gynecological empowerment came from witnessing her ordeal firsthand.

the Personal Pelvic Viewer

I couldn't help but prowl the patent records to see if they reveal as much about William Banning Vail III, the man as they do about William Banning Vail III the inventor. Would all his inventions be dedicated to righting the wrongs of the Dalkon Shield and empowering women in the privacy of their homes? What's the difference between Vail and Hugh Davis, the inventor of the Dalkon Shield, a man who never apologized for the harm that his creation caused? For one thing, Marilyn Vail is listed as a co-inventor on many of William's patents – they speak as “the inventors,” plural. An actual female collaborator counts for a lot when you're talking about foreign objects hanging out in the uterus.

It turns out that Vail holds twenty-eight patents, most of which are for oil and gas drilling processes. He is listed as the owner of a “cut stone and stone product manufacturing” business in Bothell. He has a bunch of outlier patents, though, things that have nothing to do with mineral extraction, and the oddness of this assortment kept me digging.

pre-PPV television viewing, by Laurie Simmons

Based on his eloquent case for the PPV, I want to imagine that Vail is a sympathetic inventor: when something is wrong with a person he cares about, he invents a device to make it better. Mixed in with patents for electric well-pumping systems and self-sharpening drill bits are an inhaler to prevent infections in people with cystic fibrosis, a treatment for chemotherapy-induced nausea, and “Methods and Apparatus to Synthesize Primordial Life from Inanimate Materials.” Does Marilyn have cystic fibrosis and cancer? Has William decided to create artificial life because her hysterectomy left them childless? Getting to know someone from their patents is a dubious thing. But the picture that I was assembling was one of scrappy, well-meaning invention.

a simple plan for artificial life

As a reality check, I imagined an extremely cynical scenario in which William Banning Vail III and his pelvic viewer are yet another scam targeting women perhaps overly concerned with their health. Is this a useful product or does it exploit the anxiety that many women feel about seeking medical care?

Today the Dalkon Shield is a distant memory, but it marked the beginning of an era of informed consumerism in medicine – a model in which maximum information leads to optimal decision-making. This is probably an improvement over the previous era, when you could wake up from what you thought was a routine breast biopsy to find that the surgeon had performed a full mastectomy on the spot. But it doesn't mean that the field has been leveled – information, signs and symptoms, and diagnostic criteria still need to be interpreted. Many products rushed into the vacuum created by widespread loss of faith in professional medicine – self-diagnosis, self-treatment, alternative healing – some useful and others not so much.

Vail's pelvic viewer plays both sides of this game: he spins it as a tool for extracting the best service from your doctor by gathering data yourself, recording that data on the objective medium of digital film, and presenting this evidence to the professionals when they try to dismiss your concerns. It's a weird defensive dance, but maybe Vail has the gift of sympathetic insight into the mind of the modern medical consumer. Even if the doctor tells me that I'm fine, part of me won't believe it; part of me won't trust the doctor; part of me will go home and search my symptoms for hours on the internet. Vail isn't saying that we should ignore the professionals and trust him; he's saying that all any of us has to go on is what we see through the lens.

maximum informationYears before he invented the infamous Dalkon Shield, Hugh Davis invented a test for cervical cancer. Only fifteen percent of American women in the 1960s got their recommended annual Pap smear. Since so many were unable or unwilling to visit a gynecologist, Davis invented the first at-home test, known as the Davis pipette irrigation smear. A lone female at home could swab her cervix, drop the swab in a test tube, and mail it to the lab.

This is a very sympathetic invention: it seems to acknowledge the fear, poverty, and mistrust that kept many women away from the doctor's office. Probably, from Hugh Davis' perspective, it was just another brilliant problem-solving job by Hugh Davis. He hurried on to his next project, not even bothering to see the irrigation smear through to its clinical application, which never materialized. Soon enough his life was engulfed by the Dalkon Shield scandal, and his prior work on women's health appeared tainted by recklessness and misogyny.

So when William Banning Vail III, whoever he may be, cries out in a patent application, “this ongoing situation is simply unacceptable, and something needs to be done now,” I want to believe that he's a different kind of inventor. His salvos at the retreating shade of Hugh Davis suggest that people invent things for a lot of complicated reasons. An invention codes abstract relations of power between doctors and patients, women and men – but it also tells a very specific story about how particular, flawed people navigate those relations. There's a certain level of anxiety and mistrust encapsulated in the PPV. Vail says, not incorrectly, that women have been victimized by arrogant, dismissive, condescending doctors. “With scientific evidence and knowledge in her own hands,” he argues, “the female would have the power to demand immediate attention to her medical problems.” Which is to say, even if medicine has wronged you and lost your trust, the only way to win is by speaking its language. This apparently requires sticking a video camera up your vagina.

Alicia Puglionesi is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Hugh Davis. She tumbls here.

"Example #22" - Laurie Anderson (mp3)

"Big Science" - Laurie Anderson (mp3)

"Excellent Birds" - Laurie Anderson (mp3)