so, i said it and i meant it…..we’re going to get together on the beach AGAIN. spread the word:
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1st at 4 pm
a few blocks down this time….end of 21st street, hermosa beach, California. here is a faithful and trustyworthy google map for you to get directions…
this time i pretty much SWEAR my cousin robert (who’s now 82) is finally going to bust out his ukulele. he’s a MASTER. i even taught him a radiohead song and we might do a duet. i’m also working on a sinead o’conner cover. and am taking requests on twitter. i have one day to learn.
the deal: try to come by 4. i think i’ll play, read stories from the new book and hang until around 5 pm and then we’ll do another huge-ass group photoshoot with the super-talented lindsey byrnes (the same photographer from last week). the LA times is apparently coming to cover the event, because they are amazed by the power of AFP, twitter and music. so look good, fellow geeks.
….info…. -bring fruit, cake, shareable foods, water, blankets for the gathering and -dress in aristocratic/tacky prom/formal attire that you are not afraid to destroy in salt-water for the shoot. and -bring flowers, bring balloons. bring weird shit. whatever you bring we’ll use in the shoot. lindsey plans to shoot us IN THE WATER. prepare thyself.
i’ll also be signing stuff if you want things to get signed, just bring…and bring pens.
here’s a perfect group photo from last tuesday, via lindsey:
i am going to write the worlds fastest blog while sitting in this coffee shop in ojai. i have had the best few days of my life. you know this whole Time Off thing….there’s something to it.i’m also a huge fan of the Being In Love thing. neil and i are definitely starting to irritate people on twitter with our disgustingly cute PDA (or…virtual….VDA)?which is a sign to me that the relationship is heading in the right direction, the same way i know if it’s a good record if the critics are slamming it hard.the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. but as much as i would love to lay my insides bare and talk about how happy and fuzzy i feel inside, it will wait until a later date because right now i want to catch up on the beach gathering, the show at the troubadour, and all the other awesome things that have happened in the last few days….shit man, shit’s going faaaast.
i’m really glad i took the time to write it and it’s inspiring me to spend a great amount of care and time on my Huge State Of The Music Industry And How Everything Is Going To Have To Change blog that i keep promising. remember that courtney love email that made the rounds about 10 years ago?…where she laid bare all all of her bank statements and showed exactly how it was possible to sell hundreds of thousands of records and wind up broke? it’s going to be like that, updated for the future, and including what fans can do to support the artists who are currently drowning in the possibilites of the future (the upshoot: there’s hope and we’re far more empowered than poor courtney love and her fans were). here’s a picture of courtney love, being almost-naked, because, as we know, almost-naked is awesome.
………………
speaking of almost-naked, the NINJA-BEACH gathering was such a massive success that i think i’m going to do an encore. actually, i should be honest. the reason i want to do it again is because i want more ponies and chocolate to take back to boston.no, seriously. the reason i want to do it again is because the reason i did it in the first place (to get my 82-year old cousin robert to play ukulele on the beach with me) didn’t pan out.robert kept saying he WOULDN’T DO IT even though he SLAYS at ukulele and i kept bugging him and he was like NO NO NO NO to the point where i BELIEVED him. little did i know he was totally lying and actually showed up at the beach WITH his ukulele and he never played. his wife, my other cousin katherine who’s like an aunt to me, told me to NEVER believe when he says he’s NOT going to play the ukulele. anyway….we’re going to do a beach redux with more ukulele, more ponies, more chocolate and more people.lindsey, the awesome chick who did our huge group photoshoot, is going to come back and i think we’re going to try a huge group shot IN THE WATER this time. bring prom dresses and tuxes, or at least fancy clothes and suits that you don’t mind getting salty.i’m shooting for wednesday around 4-6 pm, might have to be tuesday though. follow the twitter feed if you want to get the update, i’ll also blog it. here are some shots from last tuesdays gathering. i bought 5 chinese dresses that morning at a thrift shop and gave them away to the 5 hot girls who wore them for the group photoshoot, but i also took donations in my ukulele case and so i came out ahead.
go look, some of the photos there are just amazing and it gives you a great sense of the joyousness of the day….
…………………………………………………………………………………..
i coined a new term: TWITCHHIKING. that’s when you twitter to save cab fare. i wound up getting a ride from @devilsnight aka morgan night, a filmmaker who was kind enough to transport me & sarah’s keyboard (yes, the sarah who i found on twitter and who loaned me her axe) from hermosa beach to hollywood. morgan had the new iPhone that takes video and we experimented with trying to instantly upload a clip from his car of our twitchhiking expereience (upshoot: very positive, no rape, no murder, all love): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRinrvoVKOE&fmt=18
…………………………………………………..
the show at the troubadour was sold out and brilliant. it felt like a wonderful living room…..
there was a wonderful, heavy energy in the room because of all the Dead that day. i found out michael jackson died about 30 minutes before i left our hotel room for soundcheck, while i was practicing.
michael jackson was a giant in my life, “thriller” was one of my first tapes. he was one third of my young holy trinity (in my mind, the rock star triumverate was prince, madonna and michael jackson). watching his life devolve was hard for me. it’s frustrating to think that teenagers now can’t understand how powerful he was in 1985, how perfect and beautiful he seemed…and full of life and sex and energy and jesus christ TALENT…and the fact that he was BLACK and that EVERYBODY liked him…that he crossed all the borders, it was just huge back then. he changed the world of music. i wore one sparkly glove for most of second grade…it was like that.
but as bob lefsetz put it…he missed his childhood and now he’s gonna miss his old age. how fucked up is that?
anyway, i can’t wax too long about micahel jackson since this is supposed to be the world’s fastest blog. i wanted to do something in homage and so i quickly donwloaded the lyrics to “billie jean”, scrawled them on a piece of paper and whipped up a cover for the show….a very spare cover with lots of mistakes, but i tried:
in a wildly poetic strike of fate, one of my OTHER childhood heros came out to the show…weird al yankovic. we’d been emailing and following each other on twitter since ben folds e-introdcued us a while ago (they’re buddies) and i was so so happy to finally meet him and his wonderful wife. he’s an incredible guy. i feel so grateful to be able to meet all these people who had such a profound influence on me as a kid. so grateful and so lucky. here we are, backstage at the troubadour, looking for UFOs: http://twitpic.com/8mmwl
so………thank you al, who’s alive, thank you michael, who’s dead, and thank you world, which casts no judgment either way.
…………………………………………………………….
the other highlight of the show was covering “complicated” by avril lavigne with my opener, jenny owen youngs, but i’m not going to get caught in the youtube web search of doom right now. i’ll find it later. it was awesome, avril is awesome, jenny is awesome, & i bet it’s out there somewhere. ……………………………………………………………
after the show, neil and i signed for a while and then crashed out like two dead people.
then we woke up and got in our awesome silver convertible mustang (i shit you not: neil’s idea). neil took this of me in an antique shop in burbank…..this is a PLAYER TOY PIANO, amazing, but sadly it was broken. will have to hunt one down on ebay.
after, we drove to harlan ellison’s house. we spent the afternoon with him, his wonderful wife susan (who’s 25 years younger than harlan, and they’ve been together for 25 years, giving my age gap with neil some welcome perspective).
mr. harlan ellison is now 75 is if you don’t know him he’s a prolific sci-fi and beyond writer … it’s impossible to list the extent of his works here, so go look at his wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison.
he’s a wanky old bastard in the best way. listening to him yelling into the phone ”BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T SENT ME THE GODDAMN DRAFT YOU COCKSUCKING PIECE OF DONKEY DUNG” at his agent was the highlight of my day. he’s a one-man show of the highest caliber: the other highlight of my day was when he took me out into the street and told me the story of how he went over the a car full of four little old jewish ladies who had stopped their drive to admire his cool-looking house. he told the lady in the passenger seat that it was a half-way house for lepers. the old lady said “here? in the hills of los angeles around all these rich houses?” “sure” said harlan “why shouldn’t they have this fine quality of life, on their way to the leper colony in south carolina?” “i suppose” said the woman “…do you work here?” and that was when harlan said: “oh no, my dear, i’m one of the half-way residents…” and he reached out to grope her and the car screeched away at full throttle and he laughed them all the way down the hill. he’s a class fucking act. he also told the story of how he sued the production company that made “the terminator” for lifting the idea straight from writing he did for the tv show, “the outer limits”. it was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money but they damn well gave him the acknowledgement he deserved at the end of the film. go harlan!
fast-blogging cannot do justice to the actual house (that he’s dubbed “ellison wonderland”)….but god GOOD i can try….
imagine a house that came out of the dream-mind of god on windowpane acid throwing a gala dinner party for all the dead brilliant artists in the world and you only START to get an idea of this joint. set in the side of the hills of somewhere remote in los angeles…27 rooms, 11 of them only accessible by secret entrance. not a single inch of space on wall or ceiling left uncovered by kaleidescopic mind-blowing art or curious and story-laden artifacts…entire gaudi-esque walls covered with chess boards that spiralled into carved chairs for the players to face each other, exploding colors and old movie posters and stacks upon stacks of glass that reflected towering collections of books, ceilings molded out of psycho-trip, heavily blissed-out carved wooden doors with trick handles, hidden shelves and feet-deep table tricks at every turn that went deeper and deeper into spiraling shag-carpet paths that led you into entirely new tiny-city worlds after you thought you’d come to the end of earth 5 rooms ago….i wish i didn’t have to get up in ten minutes because i could go on about this house for hours. but HOLY shit. it makes MY uber-trippy house look like an ikea showroom.
apparently i had met harlan on a plane when i was 3, by accident, when my mom sat next to him. she had once told me the story that she met a famous writer and didn’t know who he was, and he was affronted. and apparently she kicked his ass at gin rummy. harlan argued the veracity of my mothers story. i challenged him. he won five games out of five, fair and square. cocksucker.
last installment of world’s quickest blog (neil is now staring at me and reminding me that the world’s quickest blog has taken almost an hour, but he’s gotten lots of writing done so he’s not too grumpy)….. the party we had on friday night at my friend jaron’s house (some of you will remember jaron as my sound guy and tour manager, often known as “god”). the idea was to get all of my LA friends and all of neil’s LA friends together in one place and drink mojitos. SUCCESS for sure. best thing would be to go back and look at my twitter feed, we took pictures all night, but here are some highlights….. the TWITPLATE (everyone who had a twitter at the party contributed):
and my favorite party pic…. this is (from left to right) gerard way (from my chemical romance), happily groping his wife lyn-z (of mindless self indulgence), jill tracy (a great LA cabaret singer), mr. neil gaiman, AFP and david j (from bauhaus).
AFP & lyn-z…… …who looks DAMN fucking hot for having a baby one month ago….many congrats to her and gerard.
a few more….
this is brady, pixie’s BF. upon his arrival neil apparently ran around to verify his identity to make sure he wasn’t a party crasher. pixie thought that maybe neil was just scared of clowns.
brady had just come from performing in Cirque Berzerk….and you should go check out their show if you’re in LA, i was very sad i couldn’t make it…
and possibly my favorite picture of me and mr. man ever taken….
my fastest blog ever has taken over an hour and i’m full of shit, but i got everything in i wanted to. we’re heading over to roger avary’s house for breakfast (we had dinner there last night), where there are fresh eggs laid by a chicken named afro-peeper. incredible. then out to my family’s for dinner and sad goodbyes tomorrow, we won’t see each other until the west coast later this month.
mad love. AFP.
p.s. jazmin, whoever you are, you’re amazing. i just found this on flickr……
quick quick quick……before the espresso wears off….fuuuuuuuuuuuck
god i love it here. i went jogging yesterday for the first time since my foot broke and it was fine….didn’t die. went for another jog today and got TOTALLY derailed by the hot surfers in the water under manhattan pier. holy FUCK. i want my own surfer. they don’t have surfers in new york and boston. i want…a couple of surfers. please let me know if you can arrange this. thank you.
down to bidness time: first of all, follow me on twitter. just do it. everything happening over there. i’m dead serious. if you hate twitter, get over it, or just follow me and don’t do anything else. i twittered the secret beach gig yesterday, it’s ON!
so here we be: LOS ANGELES MADDDDNESSSSS: ninja beach party today in LA!!!!!
4 pm, hermosa beach in LA, end of 16th street. we’ll probably go til about 7 pm.
bring ukuleles, snacks, love and whatever else strikes your fancy…..and be ready to do a huge impromptu photo shoot with lindsey byrnes.and she requested that everybody dress like ninjas and bring flowers. she’s got a PLAN. will post pix as soon as possible. she’s the one who took THIS beauty (below) at coachella, she’s coming to photo us all….
…speaking of this gorgeous image, we had it made into a GORGEOUS poster and will be hocking them at the troubadour, and i am sure lindsay (who’ll be there) will sign for you if you grab her at the show.also….troubadour is way sold out. yay us.note: in a non-AFP move, i probably won’t be signing after the show (i promise i have a good excuse) but i’ll come out beforehand to sign things and if you’re coming today, bring things.i’ll sign my ass off today, promise. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
me, cassandra long and her sister crane made a weird improptu twitter-pony-food-centric fan video to “eet” by regina spektor.couldn’t get the fucking song out of my head: it was the only solution. we planned it for a day and shot the whole thing in 6 hours on saturday at my house, in the garden, on my street, in a cab and in the public garden in boston. here are some pictures…..cassandra & la famille long are hard at work editing it. can’t wait to see it.
ROCK ART LOVE
(casey’s site - she’s an amazing artist - is cassandralong.net. she’s also looking for a cool paid internship this coming year in london if you got anything for her email’s on site.)
LEFSETZ LETTER TODAY: WRITE IN! earlier today, the indefatigable music-industry nexus bob lefsetz posted my story re: the recent twitter phenomemon as one of his letters…which means it will be read by thousands and thousands of industry people on his mailing list (this is good). if you guys have any input about this subject, write to him and tell him about your experiences….his voice carries out to the the world music business world and it’s a very good DIRECT pipeline of fan’s voices into industry-world: bob@lefsetz.com if you want to suscribe to his letter (for any music industry types, i highly recommend you do): http://www.lefsetz.com
and yes, you can find him on twitter: @Lefsetz (that way you can mention him in tweet-speak if and when you tell your friends about this story)
From: Amanda Palmer Subject: twitter power, or “how an indie musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using twitter”
this story has just been blowing people’s minds so i figures i should write it down.
1. FRIDAY NIGHT LOSERS T-SHIRT, $11,000
about a month ago, i was at home on a friday night (loser that i often am when i’m not touring, i almost never go out) and was, of course, on my mac, shifting between emails, links and occasionally doing some dishes and packing for a trip the next day. just a usual friday-night-rock-star-multi-tasking extravaganza.
i twitter whenever i’m online, i love the way it gives me a direct line of communication with my fans and friends.
i had already seen the power of twitter while touring…using twitter i’d gathered crowds of sometimes 200 fans with a DAY’S notice to come out and meet me in public spaces (parks, mostly) where i would play ukulele, sign, hug, take pictures, eat cake, and generally hang out and connect. this was especially helpful in the cities where we’d been unable to book all-ages gigs and there were crushed teenagers who were really grateful to have a shot at connecting with me & the community of amanda/dolls fans.
i’d also been using twitter to organize ACTUAL last-minute gigs…i twittered a secret gig in LA one morning and about 350 folks showed up 5 hours later at a warehouse space….i played piano, filmed by current.tv, and then (different camera crew) did an interview with afterellen.com. the important thing to undertsand here is that the fans were never part of the plan..,i basically just INVITED my fans to a press day, the press didnt’ plan it…i did. i was going to be playing in an empty room and doing q&a with afterellen on a coach with only the camera watching. it was like….why not tell people and do this in a warehouse instead of a hotel lobby or a blank studio? so i did.
it cost me almost nothing. the fans were psyched.
but back to the bigger, cooler story….
so there i am, alone on friday night and i make a joke on twitter (which goes out to whichever of my 30,000 followers are online):
“i hereby call THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS to ORDER, motherfucker.” 9:15 PM May 15th from web
one thing led to another, and the next thing you know there were thousands of us and we’d become the #1 topic trend on twitter. zoe keating described it as a “virtual flash mob”.
the way twitter works (if you don’t have it) is that certain topics can include a hashtag (#) and if a gazillion people start making posts that include that hashtag, the topic will zoom up the charts of what people are currently discussing. it’s a cool feature.
so anyway, there we were, virtually hanging out on twitter on a friday night. very pleased with ourselves for being such a large group, and cracking jokes.
how do you “hang out” on the internet? well, we collectively came up with a list of things that the government should do for us (free government-issued sweatpants, pizza and ponies, no tax on coffee), AND created a t-shirt. thank god my web guy sean was awake and being a loser with me on friday night because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts - that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan that someone suggested: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG”. neil gaiman and wil wheaton joined our party. the fdnas felt super-special.
by the end of the night, we’d sold 200 shirts off the quickie site (paypal only) that sean had set up. i blogged the whole story the next day and in total, in the matter of a few days, we sold over 400 shirts, for $25/ea.
we ended up grossing OVER $11,000 on the shirts. my assistant beth had the shirts printed up ASAP and mailed them from her apartment.
total made on twitter in two hours = $11,000. total made from my huge-ass ben-folds produced-major-label solo album this year = $0
2. WEBCAST AUCTION, $6000
a few nights after that, i blogged and twittered, announcing a “webcast auction” from my apartment. it went from 6 pm - 9 pm, my assitant beth sat at my side and kept her eyes on incoming bids and twitter feed. while we hocked weird goods, i sang songs and answered questions from fans. we wore kimonos and drank wine. it was a blast.
people on twitter who were tuned in re-tweeted to other fans. the word spread that it was a fun place to be and watch. we had, at peak, about 2000 people watching the webcast.
at the suggestion of a fan early in the webcastm anyone could, on demand, send us $20 via paypal and we would chew, sign and mail them a postcard. we sold about 70, and we read all those names at the end of the webcast and thanked those people for supporting us. here’s how the sales broke down:
all the items were signed by moi and hand-packed by beth and kayla. the items and highest bidders were as follows: hilary, ukulele used on the european tour: $640 jake, “guitar hero” plastic guitar controller used in album promo shoot: $250 lary b, copy neo2 magazine, plus two post-war trade slap-bracelets & a crime-photo set: $230 devi, glass dildo, with subtley-sordid backstory: $560 liz b., “hipsters ruin everything” t-shirt, made by blake (get your very own here!!!!): $155.55 shannon m., my bill bryson book, a short history of neary everything: $280 nikki, huge metal “the establishment” sign, used at rothbury festival for the circus tent i curated: $450 j.r., purple velvet “A” dress used in the dresden dolls coin-operated boy video shoot: $400 jessie & alan: who killed amanda palmer vinyl: $100 nikki: wine bottle, auctioned BY REQUEST!!! $320 shannon w., torn-to-shit vintage stockings used in the who killed amanda palmer/ michael pope video series: $200 jodi, school-note-book break-up letter, written to amanda from jonas woolverton in 7th grade (i still haven’t emailed him about that….): $250 daryl, ANOTHER wine bottle, by request, that we had LYING AROUND: $320
and…………..
reto emailed, having barely missed the wine bottle, and asked us to send him “something funny” for $129.99. we sent a heath ledger statuette.
total made on twitter in 3 hours, including the postcards, was over $6000. again, total made on my major-label solo album this year: $0
3. TWITTER DONATION-ONLY GIG, $1800 a few days later, i twittered a guest-list only event in a recording studio in boston, to take place a week later. the gig lasted about 5 hours, all told, with soundcheck and signing. i took mostly requests and we had a grand old time. first come, first served. the first 200 people to ask got in, for free. i asked for donations and made about $2200 in cash. i gave $400 back to the studio for the space and the help. we sold some weird merch. i think we should call it an even 2k.
total made at last-minute secret twitter gig, in about 5 hours = $2000 major-label record blah blah blah = $0
…..and for fun, and to thank my fans for being awesome, i’ve been doing some twitter perfomance art, including answering their questions by magic-markering my body until it’s covered, and displaying time-lapse make-up application advice….but that’s another story.
TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
…………………………………………………………………….. and…..and i twittered looking for a keyboard when i landed in LA, since i decided i needed to practice, and a few hours later….voila. this awesome and lovely girl sarah showed up with one in her trunk. i love my fucking life….
(here’s sarah in my cousin’s house, delivering the goods…)
god bless her.i practiced this morning for an hour because i felt to guilty not to. i’m so excited for the show thursday, very excited to see jenny owen youngs after almost a year of not seeing her…and very excited to see my wonderful neil tomorrow, because i miss him when he’s not around.
going to get ready for beach gig.
must find sunblock. loveAFP
coffee bean and tea leaf, stealing internet, hermosa beach, CA.
oh, oh, oh, it has been an exciting week of non-stop drama and fun.
i have learned this about myself: i do indeed abhor a vacuum.
my idea of time off is calling up random friends and running around in parks and drawing on each other and videotaping that and calling it art.
but hell. i remember two years ago when i was supposed to take a week off in bordeaux. i booked a place to stay with no internet.
i brought books and DVDs and blank paper and a rented a piano and was all set in my little villa to create and consume art.
i went totally crazy after two days of reading and drinking wine and eating chevre salads and riding my bike around.
i made friends with the guy at the bar down the street, booked a show for the upcoming friday, and spent the remainder of my week off promoting the show and practicing for it.
poor rock star, very confused without purpose, she is.
so many wonderful things have happened this past week….and many perilous things. i will tell.
but first off, some bidness:
……………………………………………..
TICKETS FOR BOTH THE UK SHOWS (london! edinburgh!) ARE ON SALE!!!!
i’m going to be traveling jack-kerouac-style through europe with neil this summer and only playing 2-3 shows (possibly adding one in germany, stayed tuned)
August 22nd in EDINBURGH!!!! at the HMV Picture House, with The Indelicates (who are awesome). buy tickets HERE.
it’s prettttty:
September 12th in LONDON!!!! at union chapel, with Polly Scattergood (who is also amazing). buy tickets HERE.
it’s VERY VERY VERY pretty:
please, please, please, please for the love of god….. buy tickets in advance so that you are not sad when show day comes and they are gone. esp. london, the venue is quite small (only fits 800).
other upcoming stuffs:
i’m playing on JULY 3rd with jason and a bunch of our freinds for his special 11th year anniversary.
tickets are ALMOST gone, but give it a shot: advance tickets
…..
the san diego show with Vermillion Lies isn’t sold out yet (i don’t think)….
i’ll have copies of the book at the show. i will be signing SOMEWHERE at comic con but not sure where yet….
if you haven’t pre-ordered it yet and want a copy, some are still available HERE. you should get it, it’s pretty:
speaking of which….
the NEIL GAIMAN/WhoKilledAmandaPalmer BOOKS are - LITERALLY - on their way to american on a slow boat from china. hot. i just got a brand new package of apology/photo cards for those who got ass-fucked in the pre-order and received xerox copies. we are working on getting them on their way to you. i hope and pray that we’re almost out of the book woods.
…………………………..
life?
underneath it all, the stability of being in love (and not hiding it from the world anymore) has anchored me in a way i’ve never felt before.
i’ve been in love a few times, but this one feels different, in a gross, delicious, very adult sort of way….it feels stabler. done-er. invitabler.
time will tell. it’s very nice to see all the well-wishing for me and neil coming in from the world of the internet and in person at my show last week.
it’s also sort of convenient (i now realize) to have a boyfriend who you don’t really need to introduce to lots of people, since lots of people already know him.
for the people who don’t know him, i get to say “he’s a writer” and watch people’s sympathetic reactions.
we had dinner with some old friends of mine in new york. they didn’t know who neil was (at all, he was just getting dragged along as the amanda-boyfriend) and they smiled and nodded throughout our whole meal tolerantly as he explained that he actually was able to make a decent living writing books and touring around reading from them out loud in front of groups of strangers.
what are you supposed to say in moments like that? (“jane, meet me me in the bathroom so i can give you the real low-down on this guy. i swear he’s not lying.”)
though neil is deft, and wise. he, graceful man, can work “i am on the new york times bestseller list, and therefore real” casually into dinner conversation without sounding at all like a wanker.
by the time dinner was over, they’d obviously decided i wasn’t dating a jobless homeless man with dreams of grandeur.
………………………….
two friday nights ago i was home alone trying to catch up on work and went on twitter to find that i’d forgotten that there were still #LOFNOTC (my trusty club of Losers Of Friday Night On Their Computers) hold-outs waiting for the party to start again.
i was certainly very exciting about not working and fucking off instead. and perhaps starting another internet party…but i didn’t want to repeat myself.
so i decided to try to communicate my thoughts through body-markering:
this, however, devolved into a Q&A session conducted via body-marker and twitter that became quite fun……
@nitonale twitpics:
AFP responds….
@alykathleen twitpics:
AFP responds….
@kaylaconspiracy twitpics:
AFP responds…. …..and by the end of the night things had gotten quite out of control….
if you want to see the full-on naked one of the finished product, go HERE. i dare you. just barely work safe. depends where you work.
by the by, the SHIRTS that were developed in the original #LOFNOTC mayhem arrived and look awesome.
they’re all sold out, but the 400+ people who bought them will now always feel special:
the world is just getting stranger and stranger.
and better.
a few nights later i played the secret little show at my friend owen’s brand new recording studio (http://www.thebridgesoundstage.com). for those old school boston folks here, this is the old fort apache (one of them, it moved a few times).
it was stiflingly hot in there, but a fantastic time was had by all…..the openers (walter sickert and the army of broken toys) entertained with gusto and a little 4-year old girl helped me decorate my keyboard and also loaned her interpretive dance/ninja skills to the first few songs. in the photo below, she is simply hiding - cleverly - behind the piano seat….
(photo: justin moore)
i played mostly just requests and a few new songs - setlist was: lua (bright eyes cover) dear old house ampersand trout heart replica oasis australia guitar hero strength through music i goooogle you the bed song (a new one, i asked it not be video’d) girl anachronism (thanks to theshadowbox.net for always providing me my setlists, which i never keep fucking track of, i love you guys)
i gave away about 200 tickets, totally for free, via twitter. there was no other way to obtain them.
we could have technically charged for the show, through paypal or something, but i wanted to do a little experiment and see what would happen if we just passed the hat.
people generally donated about $10, some gave more, some not at all.
i didn’t give my impassioned “this is your one and only chance this year to directly pay my rent” speech, which might have made a difference.
this stuff just fascinates me.
i truly believe that we’re heading into a musical economy that will rely on more of this kind of model: fans being directly called upon to support their artists.
fanagement.
more on this later in the Epic Music Business blog i keep promising.
meanwhile, the gears of the musica business tuirned freaky as i deciced to use my web powers for good?/evil? and hold a webcast auction, with wine, and beth, and beth’s girlfriend kayla, in my kitchen.
we had NO FUCKING idea if or how this would really work but basically we used beth’s computer to take bids over gmail and then had people pay using paypal immediately.
everybody was honest and after a few glitchy moment with the stream at the beginning, it was one of the most surreal and satisfying experiences of my life.
3.5 hours of complete clown-gasm. we ended up auctioning items by request, like my wineglass and the bottle we emptied, and a song request (won by marci, for $500)….which i played in my bedroom, pretty nakedly (it was hot!!!) on my piano…quite tired/drunkenly, but pretty well i gotta say for a girl who didn’t know she was going to wake up in staggering pain the next day with a kidney infection - note, ladies: always pee after sex.
so….we did it like this: i would introduce an item, give the backstory, display/model/chew on it, and set a starting bid. then beth would update the viewers about how the auction was going while i sang ukulele songs and answered random questions via twitter. about 2000 people tuned in.
all the items were signed by moi and hand-packed by beth and kayla. the items and highest bidders were as follows: hilary, ukulele used on the european tour: $640 jake, “guitar hero” plastic guitar controller used in album promo shoot: $250 lary b, copy neo2 magazine, plus two post-war trade slap-bracelets & a crime-photo set: $230 devi, glass dildo, with subtley-sordid backstory: $560 liz b., “hipsters ruin everything” t-shirt, made by blake (get your very own here!!!!): $155.55 shannon m., my bill bryson book, a short history of neary everything: $280 nikki, huge metal “the establishment” sign, used at rothbury for the circus tent: $450 j.r., purple velvet “A” dress used in the coin-operated boy video shoot: $400 jessie & alan: who killed amanda palmer vinyl: $100 nikki: ninja wine bottle $320 shannon w., torn-to-shit vintage stockings used in the who killed amanda palmer pope video series: $200 jodi, school-note-book break-up letter, written to amanda from jonas woolverton in 7th grade (i still haven’t emailed him about that….): $250 daryl, THE wine bottle: $320
and…………..
reto emailed, having barely missed the wine bottle, and asked us to send him “something funny” for $129.99. we sent a heath ledger statuette.
here are some screen-shots:
OM NOM NOMming the guitar hero controller….
OM NOM NOMming the bill bryson book….
OM NOM NOMming (ok, deep-throating) the glass dildo…
showing off my gams with the torn-to-shit-stockings….
reading the very very very sad 7th-grade break-up letter. (thanks to angryinch on theshadowbox.net for throwing these up)
we also sent signed postcards, which we chewed and planted lipstick kisses on, and mailed, for $20 a pop. i finally have my rent paid off. i was wicked behind.
then i spent all of this past week catching up with old friends and taking care of business. going to yoga. cleaning house. tidying up the ins and outs and ups and downs of my life.
and dealing with a very unpleasant urinary tract infection that turned into a kidney infection (i keep telling you, you have NO idea what you’re missing on the hourly twitter updates).
those pills that turn your pee orange…they’re fascinating. i was actually be glad to be put on the antibiotics because it gave me a 100% foolproof excuse not to drink at night and therefore spend until 2 am frenetically emailing.
does this make me
a) an alcoholic? b) a workaholic? or c) an undisciplined idiot?
there are viable arguments to be made for all these things.
another friday night rolled along and i was pretty much OVER the #LOFNOTC thing (#LOFNOTC was like SO two weeks ago) but i wound up sitting upstairs with pope and lee, just chattering and doing some work and thinking about going to bed and some poor girl twittered (jokingly, possibly, but god it seemed earnest) that she had put her make-up on JUST for #LOFNOTC time.
this got me thinking.
so i suggested we do as losers do….and put on make-up for no reason. and then sit around being lovely. and lonely. on our computers. and take pictures.
got some lovely pictures in from the twitterverse: @jinx81558
and i gave a time-lapse, step-by-step tutorial of fucked-up-amanda makeup (which you can see if you just go to my twitpic site, there’s too many to post here)….
here’s a couple leeetle ones:
and VOILA!!!!
we all toasted and went to bed (at least i did. well, sort of).
i think the internet and us undisciplined exhibitionist workaholics were simply made for each other.
i’m heading out to LA tomorrow, to hang with my family, spend time with neil, play the troubadour (sold out!) and i do plan to do another secret show, this time open to all and on the beach (probably near hermosa). i will twitter it.
bring ukuleles, and marshmallows. and love.
and if you want things SIGNED, i probably won’t be signing after the troubadour show (for good reasons, i promise), so bring stuff to the beach. then you can get things signed AND go swimming and get all salty. which is always good.
see you out there
and i love you,
Afp
p.s. i made a ridiculous video today with cassandra long and her sister crane…to regina spektor’s new song “eet”, but will have to blog about that later because i need to pack and collapse.
We’ll start the webcast around 6PM EST at partyontheinternet.com We’ll show off the items and give them names like, “2003 Amanda Dress Up Kit” and “Guitar Hero Guitar” then we’ll tell you what exactly they are (i.e. “Amanda used this in some promotional photos for the album. It’s also pictured in the WKAP sheet music and WKAP DVD”)…then we’ll start the bidding.
You will place your bids by e-mailing auction@amandapalmer.net with the subject line AUCTION ITEM NAME - BID. For example, if I wanted to bid $200 for the dress up kit, I’d put “2003 AMANDA DRESS UP KIT - $200” in the subject line. All bids are in US dollars and if you win, please be prepared to pay via PayPal as soon as the auction closes. Please do not bid unless you are serious and can pay upon the end of the webchat.
As bids come in, we’ll update you on the webcast and via Twitter as to the current high bid. When we’re about to close an item, we’ll let you know what the high bid live on the air so that you can try to beat it. Should a bidding war commence, we’ll go back and forth and count down from five ‘till no more bids come in. All winners will be announced via the webcast and Twitter with first name and last initial as well as the winning bid amount.
Amanda will sign and personalize any of the items we auction off (but we’ll sort that out once bidding is closed).
This is a new thing for all of us, so we’ll be working out the kinks as we go along…
just a quick note to inform y’all that i’m going to be doing an experimental webcast tomorrow night (monday) at 6 PM EST, including a LIVE auction of Weird Shit From My Apartment.
YES, that’s right. as i clean out my life here on this rare island of off time, i’ve been finding some Freaky Shit. AND i need rent money. SO…tour ukuleles, video costumes & props, other bizarre items AND a copy of the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book (i’m hocking my proof copy) will all be on the block and yours truly and beth will be breaking out the wine and entertaining ourselves (and hopefully you, and probably beth’s girlfriend) for about an hour or two in our revealing kimonos. if this and my cambridge rent party go well, i won’t have to tour for at least another month….off time is not financially romantic.
make sure your computer is ready for a workout, because you’ll need two windows open to bid/watch.
bids will be taken in the chat window of the broadcast!
i’ve been lazy about blogging this week but it’s because twitter has sucked my self-archiving soul into it’s greedy vortex and i am now too lazy to think beyond 140 characters.really, must i? nobody ever reads these long fucking blogs anyway. i know this because the longer my blogs get the fewer comments actually appear because only the brave and devoted have slogged through to the end.i wonder about the perfect blog length. feedback is always welcome. i am so goddam happy here in NYC, period. just being here. everything always feels more real and alive than anywhere else. it seems like fantastic shit just falls on your head off buildings, the sidewalks breathe, the colors are darker and brighter and everything smells like real city in the best way. the noise is new york noise, not boston noise.new york noise is the best kind of city noise, it’s the sound of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH instead of AAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH. that’s just my ears. i used to dream about that noise, i always miss it. in brooklyn now…i spent last week living in a hotel in soho with neil. we got hooked up with an incredibly cheap rate thanks to rob, who has been hooking me up with bad-ass hotel rates forever in exchange for free tickets to whatever show i’m playing in town. PLEASE please PLEASE nobody tell him that concert tickets to an amanda palmer show don’t actually cost two grand. my ruse would be shattered and my hotel stays in new york will become expensive and then i’ll be sad and broke. we met up with stephin merritt of the magnetic fields (if you don’t know them SHAME on you and go get 69 Love Songs right now) and went to see the coraline musical (based on neil’s book) which stephin penned the music and lyrics for. it was a beautiful, magical production dusted with drag, toy pianos and brecht, very very different from the film and the nytimes review. this describes it well. if you can get tickets, go. the theater itself is a wonder and only seats 200, since stephin wanted all the instruments and actors to be un-amplified. we snuck emily brodsky a ticket since she’s such a huge MF fan and we had a good time at the afterparty competitively spilling wine on each other. i won. then emily got a black eye on the subway ride home because some dude tried to lift her skirt up. she won. wednesday was our benefit show at housing works, which earned 10k for the cause and was the most wonderful comfy little night of inside a bookstore with rain outside and stories and piano. we auctioned off a copy of the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book for $1300 - yes, physical copies DO now actually exist, omg. feeling one in my hands was intense: i’m not lying anymore. the book is REAL. neil and i traded off reading and playing and we interrogated each other from the ask neil/amanda boxes that circulated around at the beginning of the night. neil read a beautiful story about a living statue that i had read but he’s never made public before. it’s one of the many weird coincidences that ties us together. there’s a great article up at http://spin.com/articles/amanda-palmer-and-neil-gaiman-live-new-york-city and some lovely pictures……..
“pay no attention to the man behind the naked amanda pictures”:
note the picture up on the right….that’s yours truly AFP as the eight-foot bride back in the day. (kathryn yu)
in the stacks in the basement of housing works: (kathryn yu)
it was also kind of an out-of-the-closet gig for us. we’ve been dating for a while, and while not actually keeping it a shut-up-shut-up secret, we’ve been not advertising it because….errrr, why do that? but it’s at the point where it’s just dumb so: yes. i’m dating neil gaiman. and moreover, he’s dating me. (very handy). and more than that, i truly love him. i do. the man makes me so, so, so, so happy. finding someone who understands me…really, really understands me…is a miracle. it’s never been this easy. we don’t need to change each other at all. it may sound absurd but he’s the only man i’ve ever met who’s willing to love me unedited, to take me as i am, completely, utterly. it’s been a bitch of a life, this one, running around and touring and working and trying trying to figure out this job and also trying to find real love that works. it’s near impossible. neil gets it. he gets what i do, he gets who i am, he gets how i work, inside and out, and as my friend anthony would say: he loves me despite knowing me. and i get him. i love every inch of his self. and so that’s that. i think i should keep him around, eh? he can also write, cook, sing, drive stickshift, beekeep and give great neckrubs. but the man cannot play a tambourine in rhythm to save his LIFE. can’t have it all.
……………………………………….
the highline ballroom gig was a love party, sold out, it was neil’s last night in town, we had a cakefight in beth’s honor…..(here she is with sxip shirey):
i held 3-minute confessionals in the men’s bathroom for about half an hour before the show (announced on twitter, of course)…. (photo by beth)
and emily brodsky came out and guested on “delilah” while the drummer from the lisps backed us up. then we brought the whole band onstage for “oasis” and this little number (sorry this is just a wee excerpt, but you get it):
i felt like i floated through the night, which came as a relief since i’m off tour and feeling rusty. sydney wayser (thank you thank you) loaned me her keyboard which lived up in the hotel room and i practiced my ass off but it never seems to be enough and i still fucked up all over the place. the setlist: Lua (bright eyes cover, on ukulele) Ampersand Missed Me Runs In The Family Gravity I Google You (word by mr. neil of course) Trout Heart Replica Thirty Whacks (beth’s birthday present) Guitar Hero Delilah (with emilyn brodsky and daoud from the lisps) Oasis (with emilyn brodsky and all the lisps) Yakety Yak (coasters cover, full band and brodsky) - Astronaut One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong (with Jack Palmer)
my dad had come in just for the show and since we’ve been plotting a leonard cohen covers album forever so we took a stab at a new one. he was such a trooper, he took the train from DC, had lunch with me & neil, did the show, and left on a 3 am train. rock and roll, dad!!!
we all went to bubby’s after the show (our new favorite place where we’d been eating DAILY) for 2 a.m. omelets with the whole gang then i fell asleep like a dead person while poor neil had to get up at 5 a.m. after about an hour sleep and fly to chicago to pick up an award for being a fancypants. got up, went to yoga (i recommend this place, it’s run by the same gal doing the wanderlust festival: http://www.kulayoga.com) and headed to SOMEWHERE VERY FUCKING FAR AWAY in new jersey with pope, bri and wizzle for the long-awaited NIN/JA (nine inch nails + jane’s addiction) summer extravaganza. a lot of the NIN crew has turned over since the dolls toured with them but there were plenty of familiar faces and it was nice to see trent, who laughed at my fucking sneakers after i’d twittered that i hoped he wouldn’t. DUDE. heels at an outdoor stadium? really? best twitpic of the night: i’m crushing @trent_reznor:
aside from the crushing, which i don’t think hurt him too much….he seemed so happy. he’s engaged. he put on a stellar show, as usual. the guy always delivers, he’s an incredible performer, always gives all always.
we got all giddy together about how lovely love is la la la and hung out a bit after the show and i got to gather some pearls of wisdom about the gospel according to @trent_reznor since he’s #themasterofhisownfate. I feel so lucky and humbled lately by all the help from those who’ve paved the way in these strange waters we’re negotiating as musicians. Shit’s changing and it’s changing fast.
ran into debbie harry, who’s also working on a new record and was there with some of the blondie. then watched perry farrell prance around shirtless and peacocky and sing all the hits of my high school psychedelic-soaked summers of glory and then it was time to go and i had to take a couple mental showers to wash all the happy and fancy off me at the end of the night. sometimes too many awesome things happen at once. but then you have a day of walking around park slope with your favorite philosopher friend josh and it all becomes ephemeral.
inside of me is mixed up but strangely calm. i don’t really know what i’m doing next but i’m hoping to find out soon about the label crapola, which is keeping me at the edge of my seat. i’m also getting caught in the spinning wheels of possibilities and not wanting my brain to land on one thing. i think it is probably best if i stare at the wall for a while. i’ve done shitloads this past year. i can stop. i can stop anytime. i can stop anytime i want. really i can. now, as promised in the subject, i am going to take a nap. a long nap, for about 6 hours. it will end in the morning when i wake up from it. first i will go out on the balcony and take a picture of myself and finish the PS portion of the blog, which is the best part since it involves boat chases and cyndi lauper covers. oh and here is some naan, because i also promised that.
naan-love, AFP from josh and alina’s balcony, brooklyn, 4 minutes ago
p.s. two things: here’s a clip that lee took of me & jason webley in my apartment the day we got the evelyn vinyl in the mail. we were very pleased. why lee was shooting in night vision when it was really sunny out i don’t know, but god bless him for capturing the happy moment and sharing it with this clip. i am in rarely-seem classic AFP-eyebrow-free-dü-rag-sweatpants home attire. the clip is lovely - it’s a collage of jason and me listening to the vinyl and then working on our macs while listening to the joy division cover (this is what rock stars really look like. they sit next to each other and email) and then at some point later that day or night or the next day i must have somehow figured out that “when u were mine” by prince (made famous, of course by cyndi lauper on one of the BEST albums of all time, “she’s so unusual”) was playable on my teeny casio and so jason brought the lyrics up on his mac and we did an impromptu version. jason grabs a ukulele at one point but it TOTALLY doesn’t happen.
…………………………………………………
i mentioned before that my stepfather john was working on a mystery novel and i am happy to announce that his first novel, Swedish Blood, is finally in print. i’m so proud. he worked on it for years and years after getting the itch and i’ve seen the book go through all the many birthing pains. when i was in bordeaux about two years ago taking my freaky week off i read the first draft and it’s finally finally done. it’s a classic mystery-thriller with lots of references to the landscape of my childhood and surroundings so i couldn’t read it without my nostalgia filter, but the story is a twisty-turvy whodunnit crossing landscapes from cambridge to cape cod to urban and rural sweden and the plot races past deep dark family history and identity secrets, old primitive recordings unearthed and swedish neo-nazis. what’s not to love? and there’s a great boat chase towards the end. spoiler? sorry. you can order it HERE from amazon.
if you want to buy it in person there’s going to be a little launch party for it on Wednesday June 17th from 6–7:30 pm at Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge which is a rad little house if you’ve never been. there will be swedish snacks, liquid refreshments, and possibly some brief remarks by the author. i’ll definitely be there but don’t bring dolls stuff to get signed unless you buy john’s book to get signed because then i won’t look like a dick.
i finally read this speech last week, while i was hiding away from all things online, my phone still lost somewhere back in my kitchen in boston (i still haven’t found it, and i’m finding i don’t mind much). my dad had emailed it to me and i’d glanced at it, saw it was long, and had been putting off reading it for a quieter time. so one day, while neil’s amazing daughter maddy - who’s 14 going on 15 - was practicing violin in the kitchen by the window, i sat down at the table and read it. while i listened to her banging out her bach and scales with the early evening sun pounding through the windows, the words from this pounded me with their profound trueness and i started crying on page two and pretty much kept weeping til the end. i want to share it with you. if you don’t have a 14-year old violin player nearby, i suggest throwing on your favorite/saddest/most meaningful song while you read it. it’ll help. if you don’t have any idea what to throw on, just throw on mahler’s adagio for strings from the 5th symphony, that’s pretty much enough to get you going without any reading accompaniment AND it’s name-checked down below. you could always borrow someone ELSE’S kid. someone else’s kid who plays violin would probably work better than someone else’s kid who plays tuba….though all music is actually equal. but please don’t go kidnapping young children from the local conservatory. they will find this blog, blame me, and then i’ll get arrested and we’ll all be sad.
Why Music Matters Karl Paulnack, Director, Music Division The Boston Conservatory
Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated… I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school. She said, “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite… Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome.” Lots of people sang “America the Beautiful.” The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece “Adagio for Strings.” If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie “Platoon,” a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I’ll give you one more example. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier. Even in his 70’s it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: “During World War II I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”
………………………………..
i was very very happy to have the week offline. my brain feels better and so does my heart.kyle cassidy, my long-time friend and photographer, was out in the area for the last few days of my trip and took lots of beautiful beautiful photos. this one is my perfect favorite:
it has everything a perfect picture needs: a horse (which is kind of like a pony), a warm day where no coats are needed, a very wise white dog and a man i love gazing wistfully into the unknown. but mostly, it has perfect 1973 album cover potential. thank you kyle (and everyone send their congrats to him….he and trillion stars got married a few weeks ago).
so, this is a mostly a blog about the power of twitter.
as most of you know, i’ve become obsessed with twitter and what it can do. i’m not the only one. trent reznor is obsessed, neil gaiman is obsessed. the sickness is catching.
last friday i was supposed to clean out my apartment and my email inbox and posted a twat to my fellow Losers Of Friday Night On Their Computers (aka LOFNOTC) that read:
i hereby call THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS to ORDER, motherfucker. 9:15 PM May 15th from web
one thing led to another, and the next thing you know there were thousands of us and we’d become the #1 topic trend on twitter. zoë keating described it as a “virtual flash mob”.
the way twitter works (if you don’t have it) is that certain topics can include a hashtag (#) and if a gazillion people start making posts that include that hashtag, the topic will zoom up the charts of what people are currentl discussing. it’s a cool feature. for insanace, on sunday when i started writing this, the #1 topic trend is #3turnoffwords, and people were posting things like: Inkspot_77 #3turnoffwords, you finished yet? less than 20 seconds ago from Tweetie
reidsan #3turnoffwords bros before hos! 4 minutes ago from TwitterFox
essencerenata #3turnoffwords “I’m too tired” 2 minutes ago from web
s3gro3g50 #3turnoffwords - “I have crabs” less than 20 seconds ago from web
staticfish #3turnoffwords I’m a republican. 5 minutes ago from Tweetie
for those of you still not familiar with the way twitter works, it’s basically a simple status update. posts are limited to 140 characters and must therefore be very very brief. so when you read the long thread below and you see a post that starts with an @ (i.e. @ifuckedyourmom) that means that i am letting other people on twitter know that i am repsonding to something that @ifuckedyourmom wrote.
when you see something that says “RT”, it means “re-tweet”, in otherwords, a cut and paste of something that some else has posted. so here, xXHotsauceXx is forwarding along something that @elixaday wrote.
xXHotSauceXx #3turnoffwords RT @elixaday pay me now 8 minutes ago from web
so anyway, there we were, on twitter on a friday night.
we hung out for two hours, came up with a list of things that the government should do for us, created a t-shirt (thank god sean was awake and being a loser with me because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts - that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG” (thanks emilyn brodsky).
and basically had a real-time party on the fucking internet. we ended with a long toast to the power of friday night loserdom and drank virtual wine togehter (well, i know MY wine was real. and tasty).
so holy shit, it’s just so awesome that these things happen. you can read the entire history of #LOFNOTC below, in order of what happened. by the end of the night, the whole thing had been picked up in some news stories (supermaw, for example) and we had a few celebrity losers join us (including bob lefsetz and wil wheaton…so awesome. neil gaiman joined us, but i don’t count him as a celebrity anymore now that i know he can’t cook trout).
needless to say, i did not clean or get any fucking work done.
ironicallym the next night hosted a party
if you want one of the t-shirts, they are $25 and that includes shipping ANYWHERE in the world. we’ll print them up in about a week and they’ll look something like THIS: we’ve actually turned to YOU, the #LOFNOTC army, to help us choose what color the shirt should be. you can vote (and purchase) HERE…currently (5/22 8:05PM EST) “black” is winning (so if you have something to say about that vote while you still can). we’ve sold just over 250 through twitter alone. i can’t believe this shit. now i have rent money (and i needed it).
we gave the 100th orderer a pile of AFP/dolls CDs and we gave the 200th orderer (frozentech) the infamous wine-soaked-toast-goodbye note:
plans are to give the 300th order the original sharpie drawing of the shirt back & 400th, the drawing used for the front. if we don’t get that high, i’ll mail to the Louvre.
front:
back:
that’s it. i’m going offline for a week in an explosion of luddite light. actually, by the time you read this i’ll already be gone (this blog is being written for THE FUTURE). i love you guys. so much.
PARTY ON THE INTERNET 4EVA wait, except this week.
ok, anyway.
fuck it.
nevermind.
xxxxx a
p.s. AND if this has finally won you over to the dark side and you want to follow me on twitter, go HERE and start an account. then go to http://twitter.com/amandapalmer, click the button labeled “Follow Me” and - voilà! - you’re all set. you’ll also notice some links to random folks’ twitters i follow sprinkled throughout this blog so you can follow them, too.
as some of you have gathered, this isn’t/hasn’t been a normal week since i’ve been/will be offline. beth and sean (@bethofalltrades and @indecisean over there) have been posting up news and links for me till i get back. enjoy #LOFNOTC tonight without me. i’ll be there in spirit! xa
the transcript from http://twitter.com/amandapalmer: i hereby call THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS to ORDER, motherfucker. 9:15 PM May 15th from web
@mindnumbing YES. you are hereby designated the FRIDAY NIGHT LOSERS CLUB minutes-taker. 9:22 PM May 15th from web in reply to mindnumbing
holy shit…judging from replies there’s like 200 of us in the LOFNOTC. what has become of rock n roll? what is wrong with us? i feel shame. 9:24 PM May 15th from web
@Mattwyllie NO. losers on their iPhones DON’T COUNT. you have to be at home, sitting on your ass, pref. in sweatpants, like @Certain_Songs 9:27 PM May 15th from web in reply to Mattwyllie
jesus. i take that back. there’s like 500 of us. @neilhimselfhas agreed to join our club. he’s online and definitely a LOFNOHC. 9:29 PM May 15th from web
@flickeringICE you need NO EXCUSE to be in the fucking club. exams, finals, illness or just pure loserdom. we’re a non-exclusive bunch. 9:42 PM May 15th from web in reply to flickeringICE
@GrumpyPig yes. losers up early on saturday morning in australia can join. what the fuck are you doing up on a saturday morning? loser. 9:43 PM May 15th from web in reply to GrumpyPig
@undeadbydawn dead serious. we’re non-partisan. come one and all. this is the new america. give us your tired, your poor huddled masses… 9:44 PM May 15th from web in reply to undeadbydawn
@litrock our club is an IRONIC club. of course we know we’re not REAL losers. the REAL losers are out at awful clubs trying to get laid. 9:45 PM May 15th from web in reply to litrock
@musingsofaraven stuck at work counts as loserdom. welcome!!! 9:45 PM May 15th from web in reply to musingsofaraven
@neilhimself anyone can be drafted into the losers club by a fellow loser. and note: you’re twittering, you’ve just outed yourself, neil. 9:47 PM May 15th from web in reply to neilhimself
we now number in the thousands! we could change government policy! but what should we change? how are friday night losers disenfranchised? 9:48 PM May 15th from web
@WHRWpenguins i nominate you the head of the search committee for the board of directors of LOFNOTC. go! 9:49 PM May 15th from web in reply to WHRWpenguins
ok….jesus. whos’ taking minutes?? you’re going too fast. 1) pizza prices must be reduced 2)net neutrality 3) no tax on imported coffee 9:52 PM May 15th from web
@Bill_H NO. you cannot join our fucking club if you’re at a fucking rock show. did you really need to ask me that, bill? (what show?) 9:53 PM May 15th from web in reply to Bill_H
@oscardewinter FTW:”I managed to go out, get crunk, dance a storm, kiss a boy, make a full english AND log on. How’d you like them apples?” 9:54 PM May 15th from web in reply to oscardewinter
4) free doctor pepper for everyone 5) no tax on tea, wine, vodka 6) free kittens (?) 7) free arts & crafts supplies for every member 9:56 PM May 15th from web
@WHRWpenguins this luddite AFP does not know how that fuckign hashtag things works. someone else set it up. i’m an idiot. 9:56 PM May 15th from web in reply to WHRWpenguins
@Valkyrie_NYC no, no, no. if we REDUCE movie ticket prices our club will LOSE MOMENTUM. we need to raise cost of all live entertainment. 9:57 PM May 15th from web in reply to Valkyrie_NYC
8) free ponies for all memebrs (thank you @_becca) 9:59 PM May 15th from web
@zoecello as long as you’re PLANNING on being a loser at home all night, you can join our club regardless of the time change. welcome!!! 9:59 PM May 15th from web in reply to zoecello
@johnpoulos agreed. @trent_reznor should be treasurer. he’s prob playing a show now but as soon as it’s over, we know where he’s headed. 10:01 PM May 15th from web in reply to johnpoulos
9) No more blinky, eyesore ads on web pages 10) free cake 11) government-issued members-only sweatpants 10:02 PM May 15th from web
@chellychelly nice!!!! 12) free macbooks for all members of LOFNOTC 10:03 PM May 15th from web in reply to chellychelly
@duckduckCus totally. #LOFNOTC uber alles!!!! i swear, we keep this up and we’ll be BIGGER than LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE. 10:04 PM May 15th from web in reply to duckduckCus
13) free broadband!!!! 14) comfy slippers!!!! 15) free concert tickets to all concerts on saturday!!!! 16) free llamas!!!! #LOFNOTC 10:05 PM May 15th from web
RT: “zlyoga@amandapalmer we need a club house. I vote for taking over an Ikea”. WIN. we will take over their coffee lounge & all outlets. 10:07 PM May 15th from web
oops. 12) free love #LOFNOTC 10:08 PM May 15th from web
this will go down in history as the night i didn’t want to clean my apartment and therefore took over the internet by accident. #LOFNOTC 10:09 PM May 15th from web
17) free indian take-out 18) booze available at all ikea outlets #LOFNOTC 10:10 PM May 15th from web
@_becca ok. i appoint you head of ministry of music. you have to pick the official #LOFNOTC theme song. votes may be cast by the assembly. 10:11 PM May 15th from web
@zoecello those not embracing the true inner friday loserness of their friday loserdom don’t know what theyre missing. it’s a CULT. #LOFNOTC 10:12 PM May 15th from web in reply to zoecello
@MykalBurns you’re right. it’s FRIDAY NIGHT and there’s nobody else around to take over the internet!! quick before they find us! #LOFNOTC 10:13 PM May 15th from web in reply to MykalBurns
@RobKaas @_becca is finding anthem. anybody who thought they had a thesis to write tonight is FUCKED. you must twitter. ALL HAIL #LOFNOTC 10:14 PM May 15th from web in reply to RobKaas
@MKTitsworth oh my god you’re right. huge oversight. 19) free internet porn for ALL members #LOFNOTC 10:15 PM May 15th from web in reply to MKTitsworth
20) government-issue members-only kimonos and etched martini glasses #LOFNOTC 10:16 PM May 15th from web
everybody re-tweet this: it’s official. IN IS THE NEW OUT. all hail #LOFNOTC 10:17 PM May 15th from web
RT: (@_becca) invented theme song: “i could have danced all night (but i didn’t, so i’m here)” #LOFNOTC 10:18 PM May 15th from web
@bethofalltrades no i’m not DRINKING for fucks sake. i’m PROCRASTINATING. i’ll start drinking when we hit 3,000 members. #LOFNOTC 10:19 PM May 15th from web in reply to bethofalltrades
or RT this: if you hadn’t noticed, EVERYBODY COOL is hanging out at @amandapalmer’s “LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS” #LOFNOTC 10:22 PM May 15th from web
@Kris_is_rad yes, we can take over the world. we’ve already come up with a list of 20 things the government needs to do for us. #LOFNOTC 10:24 PM May 15th from web in reply to Kris_is_rad
RT: @__lyssamazing I have a feeling that #LOFNOTC is going to turn into another Heaven’s Gate cult. The IKEACOMET will be our HALE BOPP. 10:26 PM May 15th from web
am i the only one who is very excited that twitter is the last bastion of privacy from our mothers? this all runs very deep. #LOFNOTC 10:27 PM May 15th from web
21) Personal masseuses for all members. 22) grilled cheese deemed healthy by the fda (thanks to @IHeartJBeckett) #LOFNOTC 10:28 PM May 15th from web
@SophieFumbles everybody at this meeting must drink the mandatory kool aid. #LOFNOTC 10:30 PM May 15th from web in reply to SophieFumbles
i nominate morrissey as our actual founder. can someone let him know?#LOFNOTC 10:31 PM May 15th from web
our clan motto is “i would go out tonight, but i haven’t got a stitch to wear”. unless someone can think of better morrissey lyric. #LOFNOTC 10:32 PM May 15th from web
@Alexia561 you’ll have to ask THE GOVERNMENT for your free cake, kimono and kitten. #LOFNOTC 10:33 PM May 15th from web in reply to Alexia561
“mr. president, where do you stand on the outstanding demands of the #LOFNOTC?” reports say that they plan to storm the white house and… 10:35 PM May 15th from web
RT: @jlandonw Home w/ your computer on a Fri night? So is @amandapalmer. But she started a club.What’ve you done with your night? #LOFNOTC 10:38 PM May 15th from web
i can’t even be a loser without starting a club. i’m a born club-starter. why do you think i started a fucking band? for the MUSIC? #LOFNOTC 10:39 PM May 15th from web
wait. RT: @1to10 “stop trying to make yourself seem sexier than you really are”. do you realize i just started #LOFNOTC? i’m THE anti-sexy. 10:40 PM May 15th from web
@Spooky_ yes, we can now officially toast to having over 2,000 members. i am also making that number up completely based on #LOFNOTC tweets. 10:42 PM May 15th from web in reply to Spooky_
@king_ink : honorary member of #LOFNOTC for finding perfect morrissey motto: “oh Christ, another stifled Friday night” off “Maladjusted”. 10:46 PM May 15th from web
we feel your pain, @KitCameo (I tried to go out 1 friday night, but I just ended up sitting in my car, alone, dressed as a pirate.) #LOFNOTC 10:47 PM May 15th from web
i am currently working on our club logo, in sharpie. #LOFNOTC 10:48 PM May 15th from web
ok, i’m almost ready to unveil my sharpie piece de resistance. #LOFNOTC 10:55 PM May 15th from web
RT: @Mandaz087 #LOFNOTC IS A TRENDING TOPIC!! HUZZAH!!!!! 10:55 PM May 15th from web
look at that. we actually took over the internet for a second. comrades of #LOFNOTC, this is a solemn but joyous occasion. 10:56 PM May 15th from web
http://twitpic.com/59h54 - i present to you….our official logo, comrades!!!!!!! (yes, that thing on the right is a pizza.) #LOFNOTC 10:58 PM May 15th from TwitPic
well done, minister @_becca: we’re FAMOUS!!! (this looks official? RT @twithority “New Twitter Trend: #lofnotchttp://tinyurl.com/qxxqn5”) 11:09 PM May 15th from web
everybody re-tweet it: there is nothing for us Out There. ALL HAIL #LOFNOTC !!! 11:10 PM May 15th from web
@ravenofroses well, @bethofalltrades is looking into making shirts as we speak. she hates me now. #LOFNOTC will be my undoing. she’ll quit. 11:11 PM May 15th from web in reply to ravenofroses
RT: @UnavowedHeart “Ahhhh, I just got a phone call to go out…what do I do? I didn’t answer.” we’re all here for you. one night at a time. 11:12 PM May 15th from web
@daisiespushedup it’s ALWAYS a party on the internet. though little AFP is getting tired. might have to appoint an assassin to take me out. 11:24 PM May 15th from web in reply to daisiespushedup
@jackietherobot i’m kind of with you there. i’m about to leave #LOFNOTC for straight up wine. 11:24 PM May 15th from web in reply to jackietherobot
…it’s bursting into flames as quickly as it blossomed into being. i’m about to call a recess of the first successful session of #LOFNOTC 11:27 PM May 15th from web
OMG: #LOFNOTC is ABOVE star trek on the trending topics. holy shit. look at us. 11:27 PM May 15th from web
maybe i can’t abandon you. #LOFNOTC 11:27 PM May 15th from web
RT: @_becca because everyone who went to see star trek is out tonight. #LOFNOTC FTW (i agree: there is nothing for us Out There.) 11:29 PM May 15th from web
should point out that we’re beating the jonas brothers fan club. (but they’re all draftable into #LOFNOTC, since they’re all 12 & at home.) 11:31 PM May 15th from web
RT: @oscardewinter This reminds me. If ever you meet them, could you beat the Jonas Brothers for me? 11:33 PM May 15th from web
RT: ravenofroses huzzah! we should assimilate them. #LOFNOTC (agreed. we will draft them next week, luring them with soda. before bedtime.) 11:34 PM May 15th from web
#LOFNOTC embraces #jonasparanoid!!! all one!l all one!! there is no separation between us, jonas brothers and #LOFNOTC sisters. family. 11:36 PM May 15th from web
great. now we’re hipsters. RT @ricpts It’s getting too trendy. I’ll be back when it’s more intimate (like 27,000 or so). 11:37 PM May 15th from web
i’m very torn between packing it in and waiting for @trent_reznor to officially join our loser club when he gets online tonight. #LOFNOTC 11:38 PM May 15th from web
RT: @indecisean btw, watch this shit: http://www.wolframalpha.com (THIS is the trending topic trying to beat us?!?!? they’re going dowwwn). 11:42 PM May 15th from web
holy fuck. who knew. this shits amazing. http://www.wolframalpha.com. but seriously. anyone watching THIS on a friday night….well… 11:44 PM May 15th from web
THEY MUST BE ABSORED INTO #LOFNOTC. we’re such an equal opportunity club. jonas brothers fans AND sad math geeks. all are welcome. 11:45 PM May 15th from web
(RT @Bill_H@trent_reznor is currently onstage.) i sweat to god if he knew what he was missing, he’d take a set break and twitter…. 11:46 PM May 15th from web
(RT @YelhsaRuth what about hipsters? are they welcome?) hipsters are especially welcome. they have a strong compulsion to belong somewhere. 11:48 PM May 15th from web
RT: @fatesapprentice - I think we should start a movement to pass the word on to @trent_reznor while he’s onstage. 11:49 PM May 15th from web
we could be the first twitter movement in history to halt an arena rock concert!! however, i think trent would be angry. #LOFNOTC 11:49 PM May 15th from web
wil wheaton has officially joined the losers.welcome, wil!! RT @wilw Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to join your club. #LOFNOTC 11:52 PM May 15th from web
RT: chickrawker @amandapalmer @trent_reznor is probably subconsciously twitching as we all tweet about him missing out on #LOFNOTC 11:54 PM May 15th from web
just took a hi-res photograph of my piece de resistance sharpie drawing for @bethofalltrades to make shirts with. #LOFNOTC 4eva 11:59 PM May 15th from web
(RT: @Mandaz087 will t-shirt and pony be mailed separately? or together?) t-shirt will come with pizza, vodka, masseuse, sweatpants & llama. 12:03 AM May 16th from web
will the assembly please submit ideas for the back of our t-shirt please? i shall brainstorm as well, hot sharpie in hand. #LOFNOTC 12:04 AM May 16th from web
oooh. this one is good: RT @emilynbrodsky DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG. #LOFNOTC 12:09 AM May 16th from web
i am liking the idea of a flightless twitter bird holding an empty box of wine and wearily gazing at the sunrise. #LOFNOTC 12:11 AM May 16th from web
also good. subtle. RT: @cinikalstudios “I can’t, It’s Friday” #LOFNOTC 12:15 AM May 16th from web
i just invited @lefsetz into our club. loser just sent his daily lefsetz letter. invited, nothing. DRAFTED. #LOFNOTC 12:16 AM May 16th from web
(RT: mathpunk @amandapalmer dude i am a BLISSED OUT math nerd ok??? #lofnotc #wolframalpha) if only the jonas brothers fans were so vocal…. 12:18 AM May 16th from web
@kitsun3 there is NO HONORARY MEMBERSHIP in #LOFNOTC for those on phones. you’re OUT. OUT. 12:21 AM May 16th from web in reply to kitsun3
@bethofalltrades just told me that @indecisean is making us a t-shirt order site right now. next, the world. ALL HAIL #LOFNOTC 12:23 AM May 16th from web
Lefsetz is in. Reznor is next. We’re on a fucking roll. Almost time for wine toast!!! (RT: @Lefsetz I stand accused, and INDUCTED!) 12:24 AM May 16th from web
two hours have passed since i sat down here and i have answered exactly none emails and cleaned exactly none apartment. #LOFNOTC ftw!!!! 12:31 AM May 16th from web
if you pronounce our name with a thick english accent it comes out as “laugh nazi”. what does this mean? profound #LOFNOTC 12:41 AM May 16th from web
@teresajusino dude. i swear i’m sober. i’m waiting for the wine toast, which is going to happen in about 5 minutes. everybody get glasses. 12:43 AM May 16th from web in reply to teresajusino
http://twitpic.com/59o34 - ok. consensus wins here at #LOFNOTC. i give you (drum roll…..) THE BACK OF THE SHIRT. 12:44 AM May 16th from TwitPic
picked out a chianti and finding corkscrew. #LOFNOTC 12:45 AM May 16th from web
did any of you read my blog about me going offline all next week?remember how i said this would occur?: http://bit.ly/mu8bW behold: #LOFNOTC 12:48 AM May 16th from web
oh no! #savethegame has taken #LOFNOTC’s #1 spot! time to take vengeance. one last re-tweet challenge before we toast…. 12:49 AM May 16th from web
re-tweet: DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG. #LOFNOTC 12:50 AM May 16th from web
@teresajusino dude. i swear i’m sober. i’m waiting for the wine toast, which is going to happen in about 5 minutes. everybody get glasses. 12:52 AM May 16th from web
@indecisean is officially honored w/ a purple heart for bravery for saving the comrades of #LOFNOTC by pointing out my twitter stupidity. 12:54 AM May 16th from web in reply to indecisean
2 minutes to toast. then this party is going to shut down until the next friday i have to clean my apartment. #LOFNOTC 12:57 AM May 16th from web
@Lefsetz you know you will mindlessly surf for hours. it is your nature, as a card-carrying member of #LOFNOTC. 12:58 AM May 16th from web in reply to Lefsetz
#LOFNOTC went from #1 on the charts to vanished. i think the twitter people realized our intentions were postmodern & they shut us down. 12:59 AM May 16th from web
one minute to wine toast. glasses ready? ARE YOU PROUD TO BE A #LOFNOTC ????? 1:00 AM May 16th from web
they heard our cries. we’re back on the charts. #LOFNOTC for the win. counting down. 30 seconds….. 1:02 AM May 16th from web
we’re at #2, but that’s where we belong, poetically. now. time for our toast. (clears throat). #LOFNOTC glasses HIGH!!!!!! 1:04 AM May 16th from web
dear friends, new and old. many of us are gathered here tonight because for too long, we have felt the shame. we all know it… 1:04 AM May 16th from web
…the jeers and the barely-stifled laughs as our so-called friends pack into revved up convertibles, headed for friday nights of vice…. 1:06 AM May 16th from web
…leaving us to do what we do best: hide. and twitter. as they cavort in their bars and clubs and see their star treks and jonas brothers.. 1:07 AM May 16th from web
…we secretly accomplish incredible things using the power of the internetz. they are none the wiser. we cannot blame them…. 1:07 AM May 16th from web
….we must embrace them, we must love them, accept them, we must hold back their hair when they vomit in our toilets later tonight…. 1:08 AM May 16th from web
….to all assembled!! i say: every night is friday night!!! every poor sod out on the eurotrash dance floor must come home at some point!! 1:09 AM May 16th from web
…and when they do, we will welcome them with the warm, non-partisan, loving arms of #LOFNOTC. my comrades!!! i say to you: 1:10 AM May 16th from web
LONG LIVE THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS!!!!!! HIP HIP!!!! #LOFNOTC!!!!! 1:11 AM May 16th from web
HIP HIP!!!! #LOFNOTC!!!!! 1:11 AM May 16th from web
http://twitpic.com/59pl5 - and with that, ladies and gentlemen….i take one final twitpic for you. good night, and good luck. 1:12 AM May 16th from TwitPic
alexandRAWR wrote: I really don’t want to offend you in any way, I absolutely love reading your blog and I hope that one day I can feel and experience even a fraction of what you have. But in all honesty, it hurts me a little bit when you bad talk the Onion Cellar. The experience does sound like crap and I am extremely grateful for the explanation instead of you just saying that it sucked.
I went to go see the Onion Cellar twice, never having read the book it was kinda sorta based on or knowing your expectations, and I loved it. I’m not even just talking about a superficial feeling, it made me feel. I felt this realness to it, a connection, it made me question myself. I’m not even quite sure how to put words to this. I just kinda got the feeling that I should wait to do anything and I am doing a really bad job at explaining this.
I really don’t want you to look as the Onion Cellar as such an utter failure, though I really can’t tell you how to feel. Maybe I felt something because I lived such a sheltered life, I don’t really know. Random thoughts, sorry if this doesn’t make sense.
AFP responds:
you know, i’m sorry. my own awful time inside the onion cellar definitely clouds my view of the show itself. plenty of people had really moving, real experiences at the show, you weren’t the only one. this is often a problem for artists. this happens at shows. the audience and performer can be on totally different trips…the singer can be singing a ballad and thinking about his laundry list and the girl in the front row can be weeping about her dead boyfriend. the performer can be crying during hr own song and the audience can be laughing at the bar (i’ve definitely had that one happen). my ego was so bruised that maybe i’m not giving the effect of the show enough credit: there were certainly lots and lots of reverberations, i hung out after the show every night and felt them. it’s not like we were putting on “our town”. we still made a piece that made people feel. i know that. i was there. there were even nights i cried on stage during “sing” and “delilah”. but…it just fell so short of what i had envisioned and felt so sterile compared to what it might have been. and the pain with brian made things worse. i felt like i was in a house of screaming parents getting divorced and always wanted to run and hide in the closet.
i’m an idealist. this is wonderful and terrible and drives people around me very crazy sometimes, especially the people who work for me. when 99 things go right, i’m bound to complain about the 1 that went wrong and neglect to spend too much time praising the 99 correct things. when art is concerned, i’m even more anal. i spent my entire teenage-hood and much of my mid-twenties flagellating myself with an almost catholic guilt about the things that i WASN’T creating. looking at the piles of songs that i hadn’t finished and wanting to throw myself off a cliff for being lazy. really. i was terrible. i hated myself, thought i was a fraud artist, thought that i didn’t even deserve to call myself an artist. the theater was a safe haven for me, a place where i never fell short, a place where i worked with others and created amazing things instead of stewing in my room behind a piano writing songs that i would never play for anybody. i think the stabwound of the onion cellar cut under the skin of a belief that i held, a true faith, and that’s why the pain was so great. i didn’t want to believe that theater could be a painful experience with no love in it FOR ME. i was shocked and ashamed that the cast didn’t feel like a strong, connected family (or if they did, i certainly didn’t see it). i was even more ashamed that i didn’t have the power to effect the change. it was a personal amanda palmer nightmare.
even if the show came in at a C+ (which is about the grade i’d give it) all i could feel pulsating through my body was the A+ that these thousands of people were being deprived of. i know. not zen of me at all. i did lots of yoga those months, not only to burn off the beer but to remind myself that the process was OVER and i had to discard my anger and just do the shows, and serve the audience, and not get caught up in the story and the resentment that was so alluring.
so, if it makes you feel better, i don’t feel like the onion cellar was an utter failure. not at all. i am glad it made people feel, i am glad it drew some people into the world of the dresden dolls, i am glad it existed. if anything, i’m grateful that the pain was deep enough to give birth to something as vividly wonderful as i just experienced at the high school. had the wound not been so deep, i don’t think i would’ve felt the need to stitch it up, and who knows where i’d be now.
i always talk to people about how songs no longer belong to you after you write and record them and give them away to the world. once they’re gone and out of your hands, they belong to your audience and they can interpret and use them at will. you may not like the results (and i’d be vry sad to see “coin-operated boy” used as the theme song to a neo-nazi rally in finland) but as the artist, it’s out of your hands.
but the blog here is a place where i put my pain, my conflicts, my thoughts, my stories of the life behind the art.
i think sometimes, inevitably, amanda fucking palmer the artist and amanda palmer the person are going to collide and the art may get caught in the middle. that’s my cross to bear and i take the weight of it gladly, for now.
love AFP
p.s. good morning. i still have not found my phone. (but the consensus on twitter is that off is not the new on, standby is the new on, and sleep mode is the new standby).
@jinx81558
(
