One sure sign your beloved subculture of choice has crossed the line into irritating ubiquity: its elder statesmen start jumping ship. Or at least getting cranky. Take performance artist Laurie Anderson, who's been wired in the "Wired" sense of the word since the early '80s. Only now that techno-geek is chic, she's taken to deadpanning lines like, "I've been rereading the Unabomber's manifesto lately..." during her latest "Speed of Darkness" tour.

A mostly spoken-word affair bookended by a pair of mournful synth-dirges -- "World Without End" and "Muddy River," both from her last studio effort, 1994's "Bright Red" -- the show finds Anderson meandering through a series of meditations on the ever-hyped info-revolution. And confessing to a certain degree of burn-out.

Like the incidental keyboard F/X accompanying the bulk of the performance, Anderson's observations and anecdotes -- more than a few recycled from her recent "Stories from Nerve Bible" tour -- had a shuffling, tossed-together feel. And riffs about an on-line Elvis seance and a Web conference call with violinist Pinchas Zuckerman lacked points and punchlines. But more often than not, Anderson nailed her targets with typical doses of wit, wisdom and one-liners, covering everything from Alexander the Great and beaver trapping to the origins of Radio City Music Hall and her first acid trip.

She mused on her new role as a "content provider" --"It sounds like a term from the Chinese cultural revolution." She mocked the popular stereotype of Net-head as disturbed loner -- "As if reading a book isn't deeply anti-social." She contemplated writing a song using only words that are never used in songs -- i.e., vapor, lawyers, calcium.

More seriously, Anderson set up an interesting comparison between the hunger for information and food, placing us in the hunter-gatherer stage of development in our quest for the former. And she touched on the familiar themes of control and language, the latter resulting in the show's absurdist finale, in which Anderson stuck a mini-microphone in her mouth and sang through a pillow-speaker programmed to make her voice sound like a violin.

The gesture somehow recalled both a gawky adolescent struggling with her retainer and Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar with his teeth. And it was a nice reminder that, no matter how all-encompassing technology becomes, the clever-enough will always find an equal number of ways to subvert it.