the end of the moon....

entry oh whatever think i'll just put the date from now on

may 19th

Current level of conviction in own genius (out of 10): 5.6
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3ish
Hair day: lacklustre

Bagged the last ticket for Laurie Anderson's show The End of the Moon at the Barbican last night... she is just ace. The show loosely drew on her experiences as, get this, Composer in Residence for NASA (now there's one you don't see in Guardian Media Jobs), and was similar in style and presentation to her last appearance here 2 years ago. Part-theatre, part-music, part-visual art, she padded onto the candle-strewn stage and proceeded to deliver meandering monologues in her languid, singsong voice; monologues about everything and nothing - her dog, a phone call, light, the absence of time ... and how they are all connected. I often think what an odd job an astronaut or astronomer must have, being constantly confronted with our absolute, screaming insignificance. I try not to think about how damn miniscule we are in the whole scheme of things, try to concentrate on and celebrate the tiny details of life. But just occasionally, if you, like LA, are looking at Hubble pictures of vast cumulus clouds, your mind must go KERPOW. And I loved LA's musing that life was just 'bad art'; whether we awere all just failed writers; because people wandered in and out without explanation, dying at the wrong times, things keep repeating themselves... She makes you think.* It was a very warming show; she seemed to wrap the audience up in her lullabying voice, tucking us up with her rich, enveloping electric violin and pulsing samples.

The good thing for me in experiencing these Barbican-esque shows is that it gives my brain a nifty spring-clean: I remember what it is I should be doing, and artistic ideas just flood in. Must keep going with the whole album/one-woman plus band show on the English folk story thing. Grrr.

* You may have noticed that I am a bit more inarticulate and wandering when trying to grasp huge philosophical matters. My head looks at them, attempts to think about them and then curls up into a tiny, cowering ball in order to prevent panicked self-destruction, remaining there for several minutes whilst whimpering like a toy dog who's just realised that an extremely hard cat is coming its way. I'm better at relating hilarious anecdotes involving hairdressers, gibbons or cable cars really. So erm, apologies, but hopefully you get the gist.