overyourhead

Laurie Anderson: The End of the Moon...

Last night Paul and I undertook our almost annual pilgrimage to the Barbican Theatre to see our idol Laurie Anderson perform live. She was performing The End of the Moon, the second of her trilogy of intimate solo works. It followed on from the fabulous Happiness show. And was no less fabulous itself. Weove Laurie: poet, humourist, violinist and NASA's first (and last) artist-in-residence.

Selected gems included:

Who taught you what beauty is?

Life is just bad art. Written by too many writers not knowing what they are writing about. Characters come and go almost at random. Plots start but never go anywhere. Characters die for no reason whatsoever. It's like those empty buses at night. Circling the city.

And beneath it all is your subconscious. Your subconscious can't speak. It doesn't know any words. So it just shows you pictures. This is blue. What do you make of that? And you spend years trying to figure it out.

I was in Turkey last year. On this TV show. And the audience all had guns. Pistols, machine guns, various other artillery. And I thought, "Oh oh. Not what any artist wants. A heavily armed audience."