“I’m on a vision quest of sorts: What does it mean to be a woman artist in her 40s? And how can I lay it down so that’s like, something fucking awesome,” Karen O said a few days later at a tony Lower East Side hotel that sprouted up two blocks from the tiny Mercury Lounge, where Yeah Yeah Yeahs played their first show, opening for the White Stripes. “It’s not a paved road, it’s not a well-beaten path,” she added. It’s “find your way through that wilderness and write us a postcard.”
—in the Sunday Arts&Leisure section