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CERVELLO ORCHIDEA
07/11/11 17:45
Laura Kennedy 1957 - 2011
Blue is the color I think of when I remember meeting Laura in 1976. She was a beauty, with pale, translucent skin, long legs, full lips and wavy hair covering one mischievous eye. A student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, she made super-8 films, wrote poems, and wanted to play music. Her head was full of Verlaine and Rimbaud, of Amelia Earheart, of blue aeroplanes with blue propellers. We shared a crush on Patti Smith and in our mutual visions, placed ourselves alongside Patti in New York City, picking through the ruins to create new sights and sounds, and a way of life that refused all boundaries. Laura was starry-eyed innocent and on fire with energy, a girl who loved music, literature and art more than any other girl I’d met, and she made me laugh with a humor as sharp as her heart was soft.
We were girls together, living the most exciting days of our lives together, when everything was bursting with possibility. I remember her first blue bass guitar. We’d listen to records, from the Velvet Underground to James Brown, picking the notes out forcefully, playing with confident rhythm, always with rhythm… and Laura had a rhythm all her own.
I left for New York without her, needing in my young selfish way to go it alone but Laura was tenacious and followed me there anyway, moving in with my then-band-mate and showing me who had the bigger balls. We didn’t always get along in those crazy times, but I never stopped admiring her. Creating the life she’d dreamed of, she started a band and filled it with musical soul mates with which she shared angular, funky rhythms. The Bush Tetras were and always will be a unique musical force-field, and Laura lit the primal bass spark that ignited that force. She will always be remembered for her music, her ultra-cool stance on stage, and her punk-funk bass lines… yet Laura was much more than a Bush Tetra.
The Laura I knew was beautifully human. She could never imagine an end to learning. Laura was a tough girl with a marshmallow heart. She was self-destructive as many of us were in those days, and she could be stubbornly resistant to her own good. And she was a lover and a friend, gentle, poetic and generous with the most tender of hearts. Laura was an artist, defined in part by an extraordinary moment in place and time when art exploded anew across all boundaries, and she in turn helped define that moment, inspiring others to follow their dreams. Laura was afraid of not being loved, of not feeling safe in the world, and sometimes because of that fear, she distanced those who knew her well and loved her most. Laura was a mother who loved her daughter Zoe more than anything, and Dusty was the being who came second in line to that love. Laura was a fighter who struggled with a horrible disease for many years until she finally let go, into peace. My greatest sadness for her is that she suffered for so long.
Thank you Vicky Korosi for supporting her through the difficult years of her illness. You were her rock and her strength. And thank you Sarah Holman for being with her at the end.
I love you, Laura. Where death takes us is the greatest of mysteries and you are now in possession of its secret. I'll always remember the girl you were and what I know of you today, here and now. That Blue is your color, and Peace is where I see you; a wild girl, forever flying your aeroplane with the blue propeller in a clear bright sky.
© photo by Laura Levine, text by Adele Bertei
Blue is the color I think of when I remember meeting Laura in 1976. She was a beauty, with pale, translucent skin, long legs, full lips and wavy hair covering one mischievous eye. A student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, she made super-8 films, wrote poems, and wanted to play music. Her head was full of Verlaine and Rimbaud, of Amelia Earheart, of blue aeroplanes with blue propellers. We shared a crush on Patti Smith and in our mutual visions, placed ourselves alongside Patti in New York City, picking through the ruins to create new sights and sounds, and a way of life that refused all boundaries. Laura was starry-eyed innocent and on fire with energy, a girl who loved music, literature and art more than any other girl I’d met, and she made me laugh with a humor as sharp as her heart was soft.
We were girls together, living the most exciting days of our lives together, when everything was bursting with possibility. I remember her first blue bass guitar. We’d listen to records, from the Velvet Underground to James Brown, picking the notes out forcefully, playing with confident rhythm, always with rhythm… and Laura had a rhythm all her own.
I left for New York without her, needing in my young selfish way to go it alone but Laura was tenacious and followed me there anyway, moving in with my then-band-mate and showing me who had the bigger balls. We didn’t always get along in those crazy times, but I never stopped admiring her. Creating the life she’d dreamed of, she started a band and filled it with musical soul mates with which she shared angular, funky rhythms. The Bush Tetras were and always will be a unique musical force-field, and Laura lit the primal bass spark that ignited that force. She will always be remembered for her music, her ultra-cool stance on stage, and her punk-funk bass lines… yet Laura was much more than a Bush Tetra.
The Laura I knew was beautifully human. She could never imagine an end to learning. Laura was a tough girl with a marshmallow heart. She was self-destructive as many of us were in those days, and she could be stubbornly resistant to her own good. And she was a lover and a friend, gentle, poetic and generous with the most tender of hearts. Laura was an artist, defined in part by an extraordinary moment in place and time when art exploded anew across all boundaries, and she in turn helped define that moment, inspiring others to follow their dreams. Laura was afraid of not being loved, of not feeling safe in the world, and sometimes because of that fear, she distanced those who knew her well and loved her most. Laura was a mother who loved her daughter Zoe more than anything, and Dusty was the being who came second in line to that love. Laura was a fighter who struggled with a horrible disease for many years until she finally let go, into peace. My greatest sadness for her is that she suffered for so long.
Thank you Vicky Korosi for supporting her through the difficult years of her illness. You were her rock and her strength. And thank you Sarah Holman for being with her at the end.
I love you, Laura. Where death takes us is the greatest of mysteries and you are now in possession of its secret. I'll always remember the girl you were and what I know of you today, here and now. That Blue is your color, and Peace is where I see you; a wild girl, forever flying your aeroplane with the blue propeller in a clear bright sky.
© photo by Laura Levine, text by Adele Bertei