I’ve recently discovered that places of artistic greatness have a kind of…’aura’ surrounding them. If you have the gift, you can stand outside them and just soak it all up then regurgitate it in the form of inspiration.
So, there’s a museum of lighting just opened in Melbourne. Residential lighting is now being displayed in a way never seen outside of an actual place that sells residential lighting, but…this is a museum.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to find a new place to play my music ever since Cafe Fallimento said they didn’t want me back. That’s fine…like most artists, I’m not fully understood in my time. But I’ve found out that just setting up outside the museum with my banjo allows me to mooch off the artistic wonder flowing out of the museum doors. I wonder if it works elsewhere? Probably yes, but in a different way. I found that all of my song improv became tinged with the theme of designer lighting. I came up with one wonderful little ditty on the spot: ‘The Ballad of the Lady Who Bought a Venetian Lamp then Found Out When She Got Home that it Was Actually Made in Bangladesh’. I just love songs that tell a story! And all the stories today were about lighting, and the effect it has on the human condition. Well, except for that one time in the middle of the day when no lyrics came to my head, so I decided to sing some non-lyrical poetry imitating what I thought the language of the chandelier would be if they were magically transformed into human beings. For the record, it was a bit like a mix between French and the sound of an angle grinder.
So there you have it: Melbourne’s home lighting solutions are giving me new inspiration. But I must continue to seek out new areas to drink in the artistic energy!
-Deirdre