ऑफ़ अन्गेल हिस्ट्री

"This is the time, and this is the record of the time," Laurie Anderson intones like a mantra at the start of her first big album, her Big Science, all the way back in 1984. As much an unsettling warning as it is a simple statement of mundane fact, it is a guide for all of her work: we don't just pass time, we record it by telling stories. And as she reminded us last Thursday at the Guggenheim, there's no one better at storytelling -- at recording the facts, and unsettling us -- than Anderson.

To be sure, her stories are less facts than artifacts, her performance a fanciful postmodern wonder cabinet of personal history and imagination. Like an angel in a dream, the spiky-haired postmodern icon appeared on stage in a cloud of fog and lights on the stage of the museum's downstairs auditorium. Once behind a bank of synthesizers that emitted her trademark unearthly music, Anderson unearthed some older stories and spun new ones, all vaguely hinging around issues of time. The performance, titled "Transitory Life: Some Stories," was occasioned by the museum's current exhibition on American artists contemplating Asia, The Third Mind, and the topic, she explained, has been filtered through her own adventures (and sometimes misadventures) with Buddhism. After sharing the details of a wacky upstate retreat, she guides us forward with a tale from medieval China. An exasperated emperor is interrogating a visiting lama. After a serious of cryptic replies, he finally asks, "Who are you?" The response: "I don't know."

As ever, her stories turn in circles, colored with confusion and an embrace of incompleteness, in love with the mundane. As birds of prey hover above him, her dog is introduced to a new set of fears from the sky (dangers from above is a decades-long theme), and though the story didn't need a direct allusion to New Yorkers after September 11, at least not before this audience, she offered it anyway. Recounting a stint working at the McDonald's near her house in Chinatown, she marvels at its delicious abundance of choices. "It was the first time in my life / that I could give people / exactly what they asked for," she said in that breathy, amazed voice. The audience, laughing always on cue, ate it all up.

The panoply of current concerns got their moment too, if only in brief, blurry bursts. "Americans saw it, and we broke it, and we bought it," she said. That Pottery Barn analogy was more personal too. In "The Dream Before," a chilling song about a down-and-out-in-Berlin Hansel and Gretel, Anderson brings up Walter Benjamin's angel of history:

And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress

It was not exactly clear what blew us away in the darkened auditorium: those winds of Progress, or her attempts to read backwards through them by winding, wound-up and unwound turns. Either way, her hopeful cynicism came all came prefaced by a crucial paradox about storytelling, which she tucked quietly into the middle of her memorable show: "And every time you tell it, you forget it more."