Yearly Archives: 2013

MERRY YULE-TIMES & BOXING DAYS & FESTIVUSES & SUCH
from us to you, you wonderful motherfuckers.

and now….

aie aie. back off the road and almost over the road hangover means
1) more time to blog, and yet
2) facing the mountain of things i want to share (and the piles of photos and footage) is, as ever, paralyzing.
i know i sound like a broken record every time i come back from tour and say this time i come back from tour and say this time i come back from tour and say this time i come back from tour and say th-

the only thing to do is to start – it’s like peeking out through slitted eyes at the morning-after mess once you’ve decided to accept your hangover, facing the party debris party of the night before.
it’s 4 pm. night will fall soon. do you rouse the probably-still-drunk people asleep in your bathtub? do you start cleaning the kitchen, which has so many bottles in the sink
and is overflowing with water mixed with cake, ash and vomit? do you charge your phone? can you find your phone? do you own a phone? WHO ARE YOU???
you rise from the bed and start with a shower. then you find footwear to prevent the spread of spilled beer and ash from room to room. then you go to the kitchen. you pick up a bowl,
you scoop a homemade cookie into some guac that has turned brown, feel energized, and simply start. doesn’t matter where you start.
starting in the kitchen is always good.
clearing the sink out first is always good.
opening your computer and doing email is NEVER good – you will simply get distracted and live in a museum of post-party sleaze.
deciding to crack a beer and just sit on the porch watching the sunset, drinking off your hangover – also never good.
the mess will just glare at your harder in the morning.
just start. just start. just start.

HEY GUESS WHAT
my blogs are obviously going to get more and more frequent and elaborate AND LONGER now that i have a book to write on a serious deadline.

i’m not DISTRACTED.

i’m PRACTICING.

(i’ve never appreciated this blog more. hello friends!!!!!!!!!)

i’m also starting to wonder – what the fuck is BLOG and what the fuck is BOOK?
i started writing The Book the other day and was like: HOLY SHIT EVERY SENTENCE MUST BE PERFECT.
if i can just trick myself into somehow thinking i’m writing a blog, i’ll be fine.

so

first off: thank you all for your response to the last blog, as usual the comments created a beautiful storm of emotion under the blog umbrella and all i can continue to say is that i’m so grateful you’re all so incredible.
the readership drives the engine room, and as i work on The Book (and i will be, non-stop, for the next three months), you are my audience. you are my end user. and i mean that. i don’t want to aim at any other audience. i want The Book to be aimed at the people I know are able to receive. if anyone else piles into the listening room, i’ll take em. but i don’t want this book to devolve into a mainstream project, something that i picture being sold in airports and aiming for the lowest common denominator. i want The Book to keep me where i am – respected in my own small way for telling my truth. i don’t want to serve anything else up. that’s the end of my book speech for the day.

i wanted to share what i’ve been up to for the past few weeks, because a lot of it has been notably amazing, and also because there are some people who need help.

over the first few weeks of december, it traveled around the west coast delivering the VERY LAST (except south africa – i hear you, i’m coming) of the kickstarter house parties.
the kickstarter for “theatre is evil” hit its goal on may 30th, 2012. that’s now (brace myselfs) nineteen months ago. nearing two years. that seems impossible. but look.

so all i have left to deliver now is one south africa house party and the last 100 bed song books (yes, that’s right. after almost two years of production, they’re not shipped yet. ridiculous? yes, pretty much. have we been dropping the ball left and right? yes. have we been communicating as much as possible with those 100 people about every snag we’ve hit trying to make a book as big as a table? yes, and a new update’s coming. and so far, nobody’s crucified us. YET.)

across north america, the UK, europe and australia, i delivered 34 bizarre house parties and played 8 benefits in different communities in trade for the eight generous investors who gave me interest-free loans to promote “theatre is evil”. i feel like i’ve now got a few books in me…because the house parties themselves, taken as a whole collection and adventure, are worth an illustrated work of non-fiction. but for the time being, i’ll just post some photos, with stupid captions.

and i’m going to work backwards for the next few months – as i also want to blog the parties from london, and tel aviv. but first – the now-ish.

ahhhh so.
for this round of party delivery, i invited my old friend whitney moses to accompany me as a wingman/co-pilot/driver/back-up-singer/body-worker/psychotherapist/friend.
whitney and i have know each other for over ten years, we met back when she was dating my housemate (who is still my housemate in boston) steve martin. no not that steve martin.
we met RIGHT before she decided to move to the west coast, and it was one of those sad moments where we looked at each other and sadly said “WE WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT FRIENDS”.
we swore an oath to continue trying to build our friendship, and it’s actually worked. it doesn’t hurt that now and then i call up whitney and ask her if she wants to ditch her life and hit the road with a band
(i hired her to do merch, too, back in the combustible days of the dresden dolls, and she got to “experience” me on one of my worst tours ever. i was happy she was there.)
now she lives in oakland and works as a freelance massage therapist. she also sings in a local band.
she’s also one of the coolest persons i know: she has the miraculous capacity to walk into a room and calm everybody down and make them happy.
that’s a really useful trait to have in a house party co-pilot.
(we also like the same music, and inserted PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love” into the car stereo and hardly removed it. that helps, too. – we also gave UNWOMAN’S album with the ampersand cello cover a listen.)

now that it’s over, i can look back at the patterns and start to do some dot-connecting.
more often than not, i called the hosts in advance to chat, but i didn’t always.
eric (@southships) was my ground control co-ordinator for the parties, and he got everybody into shape and answered their questions, set the dates, and whatnot.
he would send me a quick run-down of the situation. and sometimes i would just show up at the appointed address and hour and ring a doorbell, having absolutely no fucking clue what i was going to find on the other side of it.

the first party we hit was in grass valley, about a three hour drive from san francisco.
here’s what was on the other side of the doorbell: in a house deep in the forest, far from any other houses: a village of teenagers and parents more in love with each other than i’ve ever seen, anywhere.
i told whitney (and the assembled crowd) that i started feeling what i like to call “family-envy”. it’s when you drop into a family so much more ideal than your own that you kinda wanna cry with joy and envy in equal parts.
it’s reverse schadenfreude. it’s freudefreude.

i’ll leave most names out it – but the house belonged to a wonderful guy named bill. it was one of those odd scenarios where the whole family were fans: bill, his wife michele, and their teenage son jeff who was a senior (or was it junior?) at a cool local arts high school. their teenage daughter, jeff’s sister, died last year. her artwork was on the walls, bill gave me a copy of a zine that her friends had made in her memory, and every at the party, which consisted of about 12 adults and 15 kids, all talked about what a good time she would be having, and how it felt like she was right there, sitting on the stairs listening to everybody play music. it was a jam-filled night: instruments were learned (one incredible guy performed on solo tabla and then gave whitney a tabla lesson, while i tried to teach myself how to gracefully pump a harmonium and did my best nico impression).

i played requests on ukulele and on a little upright in the corner of the living room…

and we took a group photo at the very very end of a beautiful night (click to enlarge)…

the highlight: playing “lost” and dedicating it dana and her family. the whole room screamed along and – i shit you not – formed a kickline.
i’ve never before accompanied a kickline for the dead. but that’s what it was, and it was perfect and beautiful, and whitney and i drove back to san francisco feeling high and alive.

a few nights later, i played at an illegal loft whose name shall not be named for it is to remain nameless, and in order to protect the nameless illegal loft, i shall not post any photos of It. like fight club. but…wait, i’m talking about it.
i’ll try and paint with words: somewhere in san francisco is a beautiful building where a bunch of freaks live, play, build, play with lasers (!?), and change the world…and i was honored to be their entertainer for the night.
many locals had pitched in to pay for the party, and the resident evil-doers decorated the basement in my honor and (this is so fucking san francisco) BUILT ME A PIANO to play in a candle-lit room.
it felt and sounded like a frankenstein between a real stringed baby grad piano and an amplified wurlitzer, and it was pumped through an amp that echoed beautifully through the dark room, where everybody sat in chairs or on the floor and didn’t discourage me from ordering an endless string of bizarre moonshine and vodka drinks from the make-shift bar at the back of the room. i wound up talking more than playing that night, and the devolution was a glorious one. neil showed up on the very late side and descended into the basement.

that night was a weird turning point. neil has accompanied me to a few parties but i’ve generally found it doesn’t quite work. first of all, he’s famous, so people act weirder. and people are already sometimes acting weird around me, and it takes a certain amount of nightly work to unweird them to begin with. and i’m usually pretty good at that, i consider it a skill. drop neil into the equation and the unweirding becomes way more challenging. secondly, i perform differently when neil’s around. he self-consciousess me, and especially when i’m trying to be as deep and open as possible, his eyes burn a hole in my ukulele. i keep trying to figure out what it is. we talk about it.

neil considers himself to be an outsider, and he doesn’t actually like parties unless he knows everybody intimately or is in celebrity-work-mode and knows he’s the main attraction (and therefore, and this is where i think his britishness come into full play, knows the social hierarchy of the situation). but since my mission with the house parties is to untangle and destroy the traditional hierarchy and make everybody feel at ease, it doesn’t quite work with neil around. but this space was secret and strange and beautiful; i had a feeling neil would want to see it. he gets sad, usually, if he’s actually around and available and i trapeze home at 3 in the morning talking about the magic that just happened. that morning, he had dropped into a slightly freaked-out mood, so i made a deal with the fifty people at the party: if neil came, they had to not bug him. not IGNORE HIM, not PRETEND, but just…not bug him. not special him. not act weird. not corner him and deliver a small speech about their sandman tattoo. everyone happily agreed, and i have to say: i think some people were relived to also be freed of the burden of deal-with-a-celebrity. it is funny, the roles we play. and how liberating it is to flush them down the toilet sometimes. but it’s actually only possible in a group small and smart enough to manage it. i don’t think i could have accomplished it with 500 people. but with 50, it was easy.

we had an incredible time.
neil and i eventually crawled into whitney’s car and i think i fell asleep with my head in his lap before the back car door shut.

then there was a party in oakland that featured a TON of other musicians, AND BELLY DANCING, and a host and hostess unparalleled. and drag.
and whitney sang “delilah” with me…

(photo via kimberly mackoy)

(click to enlarge. bottom right corner is joe rut, and i’ve been listening to his record since. check out “and the horse i rode in on”…you can find his music HERE. if anyone has links for the other performers, comment, and i’ll make sure to add them in!!)

(photo via kimberly mackoy)

post-song HUG ATTACK (photo by almus null, aka boblopezphoto):

then we flew up to portland and i played a benefit for an INCREDIBLE place called the INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING RESOURCE CENTER, or IPRC.
Josh Gaines and his wife Anna set up the event as one of the loan-based events, and it was magical…
it’s got a storied history in portland, and while it’s hard to explain what it feels like in there, but it’s like a supernatural repository of old, old letterpress machines, a library for zines, plus…with a community center.

people got to pull their own prints of this bad-ass WE ARE THE MEDIA poster. i’m thinking this photo in itself might be a new logo for…everything.

and whitney sang again (photo via anna gaines)…

the benefit raised some dough, but if you’re local to portland and want to support them (or are just nice in general and want to support an indie)…
this is text from justin, who runs the place:
“IRPC is Portland’s own Independent Publishing Resource Center. It’s a nonprofit organization providing individual access to tolls and resources for creating independently published media and artwork since 1998.
We’ve empowered thousands of people to create and publish their own artwork, writing, zines, books, websites, comics, and graphic novels.

We’re still working very hard to raise $25,000 through the Willamette Week’s Give!Guide by midnight on December 31st. You can visit iprc.org and follow the links or go right to Give!Guide. You can donate at any level, beginning at just $10, but if you contribute $100, you’ll be signed up for our Zine of the Month Program, wherein we send a freshly-curated zine to your mailbox each month.
We will also send one of the simple “We Are the Media” Letterpress prints to the first 50 people who donate $100 or more between now and December 31.

IPRC does extensive outreach with youth and teens. Our special Media Action Project (MAP) is designed to help youth transform from passive consumers of media to more active, engaged creators of media. It’s very much in the spirit of “We Are the Media.” Here’s what a recent Media Action Project student had to say:

“MAP helped me rethink my life. Before now, I never paid much attention to the way the media creates unattainable standards of beauty and thinness for women and toughness for men.”
– 17-year-old female MAP participant
_____

that’s pretty awesome. help them out.
they also have a wishlist of things they could use besides cash.
(if you’re local and you’ve got any of the following, you can just bring it by, otherwise get in touch with them about SENDING):
• Laptops (Apple/Mac, please)
• Copy paper and art supplies
• Vacuum cleaner
• Power Drill and Toolkit
• Table top or industrial perfect binding machines.
• Comfy Reading Chairs
• Yeti Costumes (seriously)

there’s more on their wishlist HERE.

either way, local Portlandians should definitely check out this amazing community resource.
it’s a wonderful place.
the end…

and this local portland BAND, lefty & the twin, played. they are amazing. LISTEN.

THEN…..we went to LA.

we were getting tired at that point, so i borrowed pajamas from our amazing hosts:

…and we wound up at a mansion in the hollywood hills for the last party of them all.
i invited kat robichaud, fresh from The Voice-land, and we interviewed each other about fame and weirdness in the living room.

and drank nog:

it was an ugly (holiday: optional) sweater party.

ugly sweater-wearers from left to right: gala, whitney, yours truly. our alter egos are peggy sue, val & doreen.

ummm someones at the ugly sweater kickstarter house party didn’t get the memo:

in the car on our way there, it was determined that we would cover undone (aka “the sweater song”, by weezer).

we did our best. (and if you’re wondering, that’s gala, one of my favorite teenagers.)

last but not least…
this is me, with the host david, in his bathtub:

what else can i say?

happy holiday-times to all – i hope you’re somewhere safe and warm and full of love…
and i’ll see you on the other side.
(or maybe one more blog before 2014 crawls away to die)

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a

a lot of you have been asking – on the road and on twitter – about anthony and how he’s doing.

if you missed the drama…i’ll catch you up, briefly:
i just finished the long, long tour (for Theatre is Evil, the infamous kickstarter record) which was supposed to have ended this past summer but was postponed because anthony, my best friend, was facing nasty cancer (a rare kind of leukemia) and i wanted to stay with him when he went through treatment. i wrote a long blog about it HERE (which in turn links to another part of the story, HERE), and as i traveled through europe and australia doing the make-up shows, a lot of journalists (and fans) asked me how anthony was faring.

here’s the update: he’s in remission. he’s alive. he’s okay. for now. and for now is all we’ve ever got. but the good news is that every month he stays in remission, he gets further from death’s doorstep. they’re now telling him he’s got a 60% chance of staying cancer-free.

if my recent dances around cancer, life, death, bombings, controversy, and other travails have taught me anything (or solidified what i already knew), it’s this: you never know what’s coming, there are no permanent fixes, and we are all going to die.

in the past year, while this has all been going down, people dropped off left and right.
anthony’s beloved mother-in-law, pat, just died. laura, his wife and pat’s daughter, has looked like a hero to me – from the outside, at least – as she’s shouldered the death of the mother and the near-death of a husband. also, their dog, piper, is old. he’s going to die. what can you do?

becca died. she was incredibly young, and nobody understood. neil and i became a little closer with her father, bob, and her mom, linda. then, a few weeks ago, linda died. bob has lost his daughter and his wife. they had no other children. bob is cleaning out the house and came by our house in cambridge yesterday, to gift me a box of gloves that belonged to becca’s grandmother…linda’s mother. i slipped one on my hand and it fit like…a glove. i hugged bob and looked at his eyes to see if i could understand anything. what can you say to someone who’s just lost his whole household, his whole family? what can you do?

a few months ago, i was at gigi’s house. she’s my old french teacher, and one of my favorite people. she helped raise me as a teenager, along with my beloved latin teacher, doc fiveash. they were a couple back then, and i ate my lunches in their empty classrooms; we’d sit there, a strange family of three, doc with his smartfood popcorn and gigi with her bag of carrots. fuck french and latin, in those hours i’d absorb the instruction of real life, the language of dealing with the world. they treated me like a peer. i loved them both so much. when i was 17 and pregnant, i quietly wept through one of doc’s mythology lectures; he was cheerfully explaining the patterns in world myth and religion in which holy goddesses immaculately concieve and give birth to saviors after being pregnant for longer than the usual term. it was doc who saw my face when the bell rang, put on his leather jacket, skipped his next class, walked me to the woods next to the school and held me in his arms when i told him, through racking sobs, about my upcoming abortion.

doc got cancer, suddenly, while anthony was just coming out of the woods this spring. i was at gigi’s house in my old hometown a few months ago, we were chatting over tea in the backyard as the phone suddenly rang and it was doc’s sister. he was leaving the hospital, going into hospice, he was going to die for sure. what can you do? i took gigi for a walk and got in my car to drive back to cambridge, i called sean to see why my blog hadn’t posted yet, and he told me his grandmother had just died. i told him about doc, and i gave him the day off. i sighed. i looked at the sky.

i decided to go visit my sick friend jeremy geidt on the way home. fate was having a field day. jeremy had died suddenly, an hour or so before i got to the house. i saw him there in his favorite armchair, held his cold, dead hand and felt lucky to be able to say goodbye. i watched the cops come and the funeral home people put his body into a bag and then onto a stretcher and then into the back of a long black car. people jogging down the street stopped and watched with curiosity. jeremy’s irish catholic nurse, geraldine, stood beside me on the street, crossing herself. we wept. we held hands.
i found myself wishing i had some kind of ritual, some kind of sign i could make as this dead body passed me. i didn’t have one. i could go upstairs, i could call neil, and i did. neil wept too. he loved jeremy. then what? i left his house, i went to yoga. waiting for class to start, i was approached by a purple-haired girl at the bookstore. i was trying to make sense of this day in my journal. she asked me if i was amanda palmer. she could play me a song on her new ukulele, she’d just learned how to play five days before. i said yes. she played me a song. i told her my friend died, and i played her a song, and before i could ask her any questions about herself, she ran away, saying she had to catch a train to maine. i watched her run. what can you do?

you make art, you make art, you make art.

anthony and i have been teaching this to each other for many years.
neil teaches me, and i teach him back.
i feel like this is our job, this thing we do for each other, a constant reminder, a ritual, the closest thing i have to a religion.
as people, as artists, as fellow-sufferers on the short-long road from birth to death, whether we’ve driving down the middle on the autopilot of convention, zig-zagging in the side-ditches of poetry or trying to hovercraft above the road in a frantic fit of outsider experimentation…we’re all headed the same way and we all feel the same pains.

and we make art, we make art, we make art as a way of relating to our fellow travelers, the ones close by our sides, the ones we’ve accidentally trod upon, the ones who’ve been lost in a cloud of hack-inducing dust kicked up by someone’s massive pickup truck, peeling away into the sunset ahead of us, it’s bed loaded with all your old journals, your half-eaten sandwiches, every toothbrush you’ve left in every hotel. whatever. you connect, you lose sight, you don’t stop flailing around, trying to grab a hand that will pull you forward on the road, or a hand that will yank you back, stop you from running too fast, stop you from running after the truck packed with your precious belongings, stop you and remind you to breathe. the art we show each other is the disaster victim and and the red cross all at once: not just a cry for help but but also signal, a call and a response: our black and white flag above the brown dustcloud. we find each other. we remind each other.

right before anthony got sick, i tried to convince him to publish the dark and twisted memoir-short-stories he’d been writing for years. he did, and i believe in weird things, like the vital power of having an art project to steal your focus away from dying. so anthony survived, i am sure, because he had a book to publish. when he went into remission, “lunatic heroes” came out. i wrote the introduction. a lot of you read it, and a lot of you became his fans, his supporters, his listeners as he took a hesitant road trip around the area to read in bookshops and share his stories.

he didn’t need too much encouragement from me to publish the follow-up collection, which just came out (more details below), but he did need my support. if you get what i mean. for this one, well, he decided to go darker, to share the stories that were too eyebrow-raising, too personal, too “difficult” to share in the first round. he talks about his deeper fears, his long-time fetishes, he lifts the rug up harder than most people in his world feel comfortable with. or so he worried.
and he was worried.
what would THE COMMUNITY THINK? his parents were dead, so, well…no worries there. but the rest? his work colleagues and co-writers in the psychology world? his wife? his patients? we talked a lot about this over the last year. i encouraged him, to the best of my ability, to give no fuck.

i felt like i was a half-decent mentor in this area….after all, i told him, you’ll never have more haters than me. i’ll always win. he pondered this in his heart.

but: he’s also seen the positive effect of over-sharing your soul, through the lens of my career, where he gets to peek intimately. plenty of people can’t stand me, but i’ve also made true, hard, friends, deep friends, art friends. i’ve found and created a community around me because i overshare, because i try to write songs about the darkest, craziest, most personal parts of myself. that community (and i’m talking to you, hi) has become, in part, his community. he ate some of the fruits of my own labor, connecting with you all. you tasted nice.

he decided to publish the book, and he didn’t hold back on any story. he shared it all. i’m really proud of him.

neil wrote the introduction to this volume, which is called “beloved demons: confessions of an unquiet mind”. len tower, one of my favorite people and a long-time fan from the boston area, emailed neil to tell him he think it’s the best thing he ever wrote. he could be right. be that as it may, i think it’s one of the most honest writings i’ve seen neil crank out, one of the most personal. it’s about love, and mortality, and friendship, and how things change and grow. it’s about our marriage. it’s about the circle. it’s pretty beautiful.

so, i hope you read it. i feel like anthony’s story is my story, and now, in a weird way, your story.

from what i’ve heard on the road, people have been sending him things throughout his recovery: healing vibes, letters, socks (?!), songs, books, a nice pen (sent to him from down south), chocolate, and giant sculptures of amassed origami peace cranes. you guys amaze me, because your love has flowed right past me and into the hearts of those i love. and…without getting too deep on you here, i think that’s when love feels real, when it goes through you and beyond you, when it works through you. it says a lot about you as a fanbase – about what we’ve built. i mean, i wasn’t expecting you guys to lambast and crucify me when i postponed a tour, you’re a pretty understanding lot – but i wasn’t expecting an outpouring of generosity in its stead. i am so fucking lucky. we all are.

i’m about to go into my own period of writing, i’ve signed a book contract of my own, and i can’t help but to see this all as a continuum.
anthony helped me for years when i was growing up, he cracked me open and gave me the stable base that made it possible for me to attack my own psyche and share truthfully, to challenge my own fears, and to love deeply. i feel like i returned that gift by encouraging and helping him to write and self-publish this book – the one he was afraid to.

and now, as i settle down for a very frightening writing project (i’ve never written a whole book before, believe me, i’m terrified), i’m going to draw inspiration right back out of his lungs – like those feisty greeks gods and mortals doc taught me about when i was a wee bairn. AND i’m going to plant my hungry art-mouth right on neil gaiman’s face and suck the divine force out of him, too: i’m going to gulp magic air from the brave plummet he took in writing and publishing “ocean” – i saw him, he was shit scared. and he did it anyway.

we make art, we make art, we pass the cosmic creative cold sore back and forth through the kiss of life, never to fully heal, never fully resuscitated, but always, always, always in love…never sure who the next breath is going to come from, or where it’s going to take us.

what can you do? you’re going to die anyway.

ENJOY.

and now, a word from dr. anthony (i affectionally call him “clown-fucker”) himself. he has a fear of clowns.
i thought it might be nice for him to write straight to you.

………………..

Amanda asked me to write something for her to post on her blog. Here it is:

To begin, I feel so grateful to all of you, all of her fans (and Neil’s), who have supported me through this grave, shocking and upsetting illness. I remember feeling that, if good vibes and wishes were healing in any cosmic way, I would be saved. I am doing well and, though not out of the woods, am in an ever widening clearing. Thank you, all of you, eternally. Also, thank you for buying Lunatic Heroes. It was the project I did in the midst of a lot of suffering and loss (loss of hearing, eyesight, balance and more). Your acceptance of it and responses and reviews meant so very, very much to me. Again, thank you all.

This new book, available now: Beloved Demons: Confessions of an Unquiet Mind, is deeper, more raw and revealing, and is centered on adult, rather than primarily experiences from my youth, as in Lunatic Heroes. In Beloved Demons I take my pants not just down, but off and run around the street hanging a rat in the public square. Essentially, I have pilloried myself, hanged by my own hand and yet, I feel safe and secure in the knowledge that you will still be there, accepting and understanding me. I apologize for any of the unintended offenses there may be in the book. I mean no harm. I mean to be known so that I can feel connected to you, in relationship with you, as I have felt since Lunatic Heroes came out a year ago.
Amanda says she’ll add her own words to this and somebody, more clever than I am, will insert links to the book and the launch and any other important stuff. I hope to see many of you in Cambridge on Dec 29th and I hope you like Beloved Demons and that you feel free to tell me your secrets when all is said and done.

Love, Anthony

so, the details…
the book is available HERE if you’re an amazon-freak.
but better, you can support an independent bookstore HERE (porter square books, the same shop that released and shipped neil’s last book, “the ocean at the end of the lane” (amazon / UK link). they’re really, really nice people in cambridge.)

neil and i are going to be joining anthony in a book launch on december 29th, 4 pm at porter square books. it’s a teeny place and only fits about 80 people, so please come on time. we’ll be happy to see you there. (click the poster below for more info)

a few more…
anthony’s twitter: twitter.com/DRAMARTIGNETTI
anthony’s facebook: facebook.com/camstories
he’s also got two more readings (on the 11th and 18th of january) with Souled Out Artists, a group he’s in with BOGARTTTT. they’re also in lexington.

and…

caveat emptor.

and if you like his book, don’t flatter him too much.
it’ll go to his goddam head.

if i don’t blog before xmas, have a good one. but who knows, i might hit you again.

love
AFP

p.s. here’s a shot of me and anthony, after he read a piece from the new book at the red star webcast a few months ago. yes, indeed. he’s pretty alive.

p.p.s.
gigi and doc.

becca.

sean’s grandmother:

…with sean and magic (the cat)

jeremy.

anthony, getting treatment.

feet.

the point of it all…?

hola comrades…

i wanted to share this clip with you and encourage you to delve further and watch the entire performance.
i’d watch it in a quiet space, it’s pretty dark. and powerful.

the background story:
about two months ago, i was invited to travel to the united nations – which is a giant-ass building in new york city overlooking the east river.
it was about 18 degrees that day. (let’s not get crazy about the importance and history of the united nations, but suffice it to say i felt sufficiently humbled thinking about the amount of decisions that have been made in those halls. mostly decisions made – let’s just call it – by men.)

two things converged.

one: the division of the united nations called UN women came into existence, as did the concept of a
UNITED NATIONS DAY TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN,
which was why i was invited there on november 25th.

two: the united nations has hired the equivalent of an Artistic Director, whose job it is to bring the performing arts into the UN building. i think that’s incredible in itself: they’ve been showing films and creating performances IN THE HALLS of the UN, which are attended by the ambassadors, their families, and the huge community of people who work in that crazy building – whose stated purpose is promote international cooperation and (hopefully) ensure that we don’t wind up in world war III anytime soon. hooray for art.

where politics and art intersect, incredible insights can and do happen. i think art can teach things that speeches and graphs cannot, and so i think it is awesome that the UN created this opportunity.

for the end-violence-against-women day, the UN brought in a celebrated italian playwright named serena dandini to present a set of monologues she’d written called “ferite a morte” (translating to “wounded to death”)…

…it’s a sort of spoon-river-anthology style set of intimate confessions, reflections and recounts from women speaking from beyond the grave…all of whom had died at the hands of violence (sometimes domestic, sometimes random, always unnecessary). it’s not a walk in the park, this piece. it’s dark as fuck.

serena invited 16 women to read the monologues to the assembled crowd, which included a lot of the ambassadors to the UN. the house was packed.
i didn’t know which to be more impressed by: the UN ambassadors in the audience or the powerhouse women i was reading alongside.
here they are (with twitter name, if applicable)

• Monique Coleman (@gimmemotalk), actress (“high school musical”)
• Laurie Fabiano, activist, author, organizer
• Marina Abramović (@HudsonMAI), performance artist, you probably know her from “the artist is present”
• Nan Goldin (brave photographer, and i quote: “what’s twitter? i don’t do the Internet.” LOVE.)
• Serena Dandini (@SerenaDandini), playwright, author, TV presenter
• Nona Hendryx (musician, activist, out bisexual, one of the three members of Labelle, “lady marmalade” hero)
• Maureen Van Zandt (@MVZaGoGo), actress (known from “the sopranos”)
• Najla Said (@NajlaSaid1), writer, comedian, actress, arab-american activist
• Maria Grazia Cucinotta – actress, screenwriter, model
• Angela Della Costanza Turner – italian honorary consul
• Abigail E Disney (@abigaildisney), documentary filmmaker, activist
• Rosy Canale (@rosycanale1), activist, survivor of brutal italian mafia violence
• Maura Misiti – researcher, activist
• Valeria Golina – actress, director
• Giovanna Calvino (@giovannacalvino) – author
• Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) …. that’s me.

the first thing i did was take a picture in the main UN hall, because, ukulele in the united nations.

LET’S RATIFY SOME SHIT!

there was a press conference in which serena, sebastiano cardi (the italian ambassador to the UN), and lakshmi puri (the deputy executive director of UN women) talked to the press corps about the day, and about the statistics of violence against women (sobering).

…for instance, some of what was shared:
• 1 in 3 women worldwide experiences some form of physical violence inflicted against her in her lifetime.
• women aged 15-44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, motor accidents, war, and malaria. (according to World Bank data)
• it is estimated that 1 in 5 women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. (worldwide)
• young women are particularly vulnerable to coerced sex, and are increasingly being infected with HIV/AIDS. over HALF of new HIV infections worldwide are occurring among young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and more than 60% of HIV-positive youth in this age bracket are female.
• in many societies, women suspected of engaging in premarital sex (including rape victims and women accused of adultery) have been murdered by their relatives; the violation of a woman’s chastity is viewed as an affront to the family’s honour. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates the annual worldwide number of these “honour killing” victims may be as high as 5,000 women.
(there are many, many more facts and numbers and heartbreaking figures. you can read more and see additional sources, here.)

then all the women got together, and we rehearsed the monologues backstage for a few hours, but not before we went around in a circle and introduced ourselves. my god, the power in that room….

….i sat next to monique coleman (far right), who became known for “high school musical”…which i’d never seen but i have enough cultural IQ to know it was a big deal. she and i talked a lot about performing, sexism in the industry, learning from shit, and life in general. the woman was incredible.

(previous two photos via Neige De Benedetti)

nadja said, another actress, came over and joined the conversation. there was a lot of interesting talk about sexism and agism in the film/TV/theater world.

serene is at the head of the table, and to her right is rosy canale. she introduced herself to the group towards the end, and told us all the story about how the italian mafia had beaten her, almost to death, because she refused to turn a blind eye to their drug-selling in her nightclub. they kicked and pistol-whipped her. they left her for dead, thinking they’d finished the job, but she made it out, a bloody mess.

here‘s a piece from the guardian about it.
she’s currently living in america because if she returns to italy, she’ll probably be killed for speaking out.

as she told her story, monique leaned over and showed me her arm, which was covered with goosebumps.

she finished by looking at all of us and saying “i have new teeth. and new legs. and a new soul.”

i grabbed monique’s hand under the table. i don’t think there was a dry eye in that room.

we went to the united nations bathroom and turned it into a dressing room. there was a fantastic discussion about make-up and fashion and The Cage of It. the irony that speaking such giant truths involved prettifying. what’s the way out? who knows. we’ll work on it.

(photo by laurie fabiano)

she in the top hat is nona hendryx (yes, related to that other hendrix musician), and she was one of my favorites.
nona is an out lesbian (has been since day one) and was one third of LaBelle (they were famously known for the song “lady marmalade”).
here we is together. i want to be her when i’m 69.

the full performance of “wounded to death”, with all 16 women reading, was streamed live from the UN…
the mood was somber, and as you can see from the list of speakers, it was a mix of performers and non-performers.
here we all were after the final reading (photo by Neige De Benedetti):

my reading was the only one that wasn’t from the perspective of a single woman – it was a little more esoteric than the others.
i was proud that serene trusted me to read it.
i tried not to perform.
i tried just to speak.

(via Neige De Benedetti)

it was a surreal experience, empowering, huge…
…and at the same time, i felt so incredibly small in the face of what we were trying to talk about, to fix. it felt like balancing at the tip of en evil iceberg.

here goes:

and the entire performance, living on the UN website, is HERE, and lasts about an hour and 40 minutes.

the text from my piece is below.

THE WASTELAND
“My window was small and had bars. From my cell I could see a sliver of sky, a sky from the South or the North of the world, it makes no difference. If you end up in the wrong prison, nobody can help you because it’s your word against a policeman’s, and your word counts for as much as a crumpled piece of paper.

Try to guess: was I locked up in India, America, or South Africa? Maybe I was a Bosnian girl under the falling bombs, or a woman living alone in Rwanda during the war, or in some dangerous square in Egypt. Or perhaps I was an African-American girl in Cleveland, and he was a good cop from Ohio. Or else I could have been a student in Genoa at Bolzaneto, or a Nigerian refugee locked up in an immigrant detention centre. It makes no difference. No one would have taken my word over his, anyway.

Men you beat up to death; women you rape first and then you let them die. It’s the way things have been since the dawn of time and these stories no longer make the news. Cases are difficult to bring to trial, witnesses don’t show up to testify. Going against the established order is not worth the trouble. There will always be a defense lawyer claiming it was consensual, then something went awry, and it ended badly. Though it didn’t seem that way for the man involved, of course. Men in uniforms get away with things all over the world, you can be sure of that. They are men of the law, here to serve and protect. You wouldn’t want to insult the nation and question their authority with your accusations. Gang rapes, war rapes, abuses inside army barracks, behind closed doors. It’s nothing personal. You’re part of the spoils of war, a victim of military order, a sheep that strayed from the flock, and then just someone’s whim for the night. The law of the jungle is protected by the establishment: only the strong survive. They get immunity, while you amount to nothing. You have no say. You’re just a number in a statistics chart no one cares about.

Now there are so many of us that we need a heaven of our own, where no man can threaten us with his badge or gun ever again. The battle is over.

Now, at last, I am transparent like the air. I can sleep in my bed of clouds, feeling light, intangible, freed from that woman’s body everyone wanted to own – it was too beautiful to be real, and too easy to devour.”

love.
AFP

p.s. more soon. bryony kimmings and i (and a handful of others) are still working on our new-wave (no-wave?) feminist manifesto from our night at The Other Club. now it seems like we’ve got to get this shit just right, or else. look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity…to seize everything you ever wanted…one moment…would you capture it? or just let it slip?
yo.
word.
adjective.
adverb.
where my gerunds at?

SAN FRANCISCO AREA – TOWN HALL MEETING, this tuesday at 5pm.

dear comrades…i is calling a Town Hall meeting. the folks at BitTorrent have been kind enough to offer us their space, and will also help me pick our brains.

this idea just emerged a couple days ago…BitTorrent invited me to their offices, i’ve been wanting to hold a town hall, and bam, we’re doing it.

goal? to talk openly about how i’m going to release music over the next year (i’m wide open to ideas), about the Internet in general, streaming vs downloading, its impact on artists, and the future as built by us, motherfuckers.

its FREE

and happening
this tuesday
December 10, 2013
5:00 – 7:00pm

at
BitTorrent HQ
303 Second Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco

space is VERY limited: we’ve only got room for 30-40 participants, plus there will be a handful of BitTorrent folk. we will be filming the event and hopefully streaming, stay tuned for that. yes i’m going to bring the ukulele and play some songs because obviously.

it looks like we’ll also be joined by fellow DIY music-ally and old touring friend of mine (and poetry brothel mistress) @ZoeBoekbinder.

if you want to come, listen, share, throw down…there’s a survey here. we’ll pick a handful of folks who seem like a good mix.

(needs to be in by 5:00 PM PST on Friday, December 6, 2013.

guests will be notified by 2:00 PM PST on Monday.)

http://bit.ly/IEMmNO

word

adverb

adjective.

INTERVIEW OF THE YEAR. Bob Lefsetz & me smack it down at Canadian Music Week on May 8, 2014. cannot wait for this.

Grab all the details HERE

For tickets info, head to www.cmw.net

About Canadian Music Week:
Now in its 32nd year, CANADIAN MUSIC WEEK is recognized as one of the premier entertainment events in North America focusing on the business of music. We bring together Sound Recording, New Media and Broadcast for one spectacular week of events… Combining informative, intensive conferences, a cutting edge trade exhibition, award shows, film festival, comedy festival and Canada’s biggest New Music Festival. The Canadian Music Week festival spans 5 nights of performances, with 1,000 showcasing bands at more than 60 live music venues in downtown Toronto.  All convention functions take place at the Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre.

Amanda Palmer will be performing an intimate solo show at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, December 12, 2013 at 8PM PST.

General Admission gets you a hand pulled letterpress poster commemorating the event. A “Patron Package” includes an informal catered reception with Amanda & a 3-month membership to the IPRC.

Only 80 tickets are available for this show, and they’re selling very quickly.

More info here: http://www.iprc.org/calendar/a-special-evening-with-amanda-palmer

**UPDATE**
The webcast is now available online. Watch the archived version below or HERE

Amanda Palmer will be performing at the United Nations Commemoration of the International Day to End Violence against Women on Monday, November 25th.

A theatrical performance of “Wounded to Death” will be presented by Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and the Permanent Representative of Italy to the United Nations, Ambassador Sebastiano Cardi.

Both the official press conference and performance will be available thru live webcast.

More information can be found at: http://bit.ly/UNEndViolence

Amanda Palmer will be headlining during the celebratory event for A Total Disruption at the Echoplex on Sunday, December 15, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA.

Other appearance include Ondi Timoner (2x Sundance-winning filmmaker of DIG!, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC), Shepard Fairey (AKA DJ Diabetic), and Alexis Ohanian (Co-founder or Reddit).

For more info and tickets visit: http://www.theecho.com/event/423865-total-disruption-amanda-los-angeles

The first 50 people to use the discount code “DISRUPT” get a reduced ticket price at $30.

at 1pm est on november 19th, neil and i did a reddit AMA. the following blog contains a collection of various questions and our respective answers (neil in dark-reddit-blue and amanda in dark-reddit-orange) all organized for easy reading. they are presented, as chronicled by @indeciSEAN, in a sort of particular order (but not exactly). enjoy!!!

hardest thing….rggggg.
probably the night in san francicso where we wound up bickering about the set list and running order. i’d just realized that i’d left my passport back in boston because i’d forgotten i’d need it on the trip to get over the canadian border to the vancouver show. that set me on edge to begin with. then i sat down to write my set list and it finally dawned on me that i was only going to have a few shots at performing perfectly all the songs i wanted to try to squeeze onto this collection.
so that night ended up being a minor stress-fest, mostly my fault to begin with…but as in any relationship the testy feelings wound up snowballing and we bot treated each other grumpily.
that’s in the relationship department….in the practical DIY record-label given how many decisions needed to be made (about artwork, about track listing, about money, about materials, about timelines) it’s actually quite refreshing to look back and see that we barely had a single disagreement. but that’s why we did this project…we wanted it to be fun, not hard, not stressful.
aside from the togetherness… i had a generally difficult time trying to decide which tracks to pick for the SHOWS themselves, because i knew i’d be releasing those songs exclusively on this album, at least for now. songs like “dear old house”, “judy blume” and “look mummy, no hands” had never been available before. and i wanted them to have the best possible presentation when tehy made their debuts to the listener’s ears…which is impossible to control when you’re in a live setting and not a recording studio. so a lot of moments on stage i felt like i was on a fucking tightrope, since i had to absolutely nail the takes and not be as sloppy as i usually allow myself to be.
at the end of the day i’m actually REALLY proud of how all the recordings came out, mine, neil’s, and the “together” ones. when i heard the first set of recordings and calculated that we actually had a killer take of each tune, my heart soared with relief.

↳ I had it easier, because I didn’t have any real agenda on what I wanted to record or not record.
The hardest thing was listening to EVERYTHING. About 25 hours of material. And then deciding what would go on.
No, that’s not true. The hardest thing was singing in public, and listening to recordings of me singing in public. Everything else was easy compared to that.
source/context

What was the hardest part about performing An Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer?

The hardest part was that both Amanda and I were used to being the Last Word when we were on stage or doing an event. Lots of people could have opinions, but at the end of the day, I’d say “Yes, I’ll do this” or “No, I don’t think so”. Which, oddly enough, was Amanda’s world too.
And now we were both trying to put a show together in which each of us felt (knew?) that we should be the one who makes the final decision. On everything. And we kept bumping into each other, and learning to give way with good grace.
Sort of like a marriage in miniature, now I come to think about it.
source/context

Do you have a favorite Evening With so far?

I loved the one in Vancouver most of all. But then, I loved almost all of them.
source/context

I’m looking forward to experiencing the Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. What am I to expect from the album?

Three disks. One of me talking. One of Amanda singing. One of us both talking and singing and other stuff too.
source/context

How often do you get a chance to collaborate on songs, stories, writing, or do you just generally draw inspiration from one another as artists?

hola capn
we certainly generally draw inspiration (and love, and all that stuff) from each other, that’s the nice thing about being a couple and more or less around and supportive of each others’ work and careers.
as far as collaborating: this tour and album is probably the deepest it’ll get for now…. when we put the record together, we divided it into three discs: -the neil disc (all neil reading, with introductions) -the amanda disc (all me singing, with introductions) -and the shit we do together disc…which actually had more on it than we had anticipated and we were both pleasantly surprised. we covered the songs “jump” (me on piano and neil on vocal…a hilarious “hymn” by brit comedians peter cook and dudley moore), “psycho” (me on ukulele and neil on vocal, by leon payne), and we did some originals together that neil wrote and i played on piano: “i google you” and “the problem with saints” (which ben folds actually wrote the music for during our crazy 8 in 8 project all together)….and then there are some poems we wrote for each other, and a long q&a.
source/context

I’m excited to be coming to the Evening with Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer event on Saturday in NY. Can I bring you guys anything?

to us: you can ALWAYS bring hugs. also always nice to bring edible things/weird inedible treats to share with the rest of audience. i love when people share shit, it brings the crowd together. sometimes people share origami. or small pieces of art they’re made. go crazy.
source/context

I am super excited to see you guys on Saturday. I’m curious – will these new “Evening With…” shows be filled with different things than the album release? What’s your process like for deciding what goes into one?

There is always new stuff. That’s the fun of it.
source/context

How did you guys meet?

We were introduced over email by Jason Webley, after I said something nice about one of the songs he and Amanda did together as Evelyn Evelyn on my blog. We met because Amanda asked me to write some stories to accompany photographs of her dead, to make a book called WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER. We met in the green room of the NYC Comic Con, and we didn’t fancy each other at all. There are photographs of us and Stan Lee together there. Amanda did not know who he was. I found this refreshing.

↳ it’s true. i was also in a relationship at the time with no interest in falling in love with neil gaiman…and i barely knew his work. we’ve looked back at the photos from that day and had a good laugh. neil looks like hell and has a black eye (his dog gave it to him…..long story) and i looked (according to neil) pudgy and mannish and absolutely “not his type”. nor was he mine.
the reason we’re convinced this relationship has legs is that we fell in love with each other’s personalities and brains and then, later, with each others bodies and faces….from a deeper place.

Long story about a dog and a black eye? This is the perfect crowd for a long story!

Here’s a photograph of me the day or so before I met her: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/q-was-this-face-that-launched-thousand.html
source/context

You raised enough on the kickstarter to video the shows – is a DVD going to appear?

indeed – we took some of the profit from the kickstarter and taped the last two shows. we JUST put up the first few clips:
part 1: http://youtu.be/1UK7EmzrLXQ
part 2: http://youtu.be/yVVWWHfLhZ0
and here’s us doing “makin’ whoopee”, same editing team:
http://youtu.be/ePH-TZPUjfc
source/context

Just finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane, thoroughly enjoyed it.
What was your largest inspiration for the story?

Missing Amanda. I wanted to write something for her, because she was making THEATRE IS EVIL in Australia, and I was in Florida. I took my childhood and the places I lived as a boy, and put them into a story for her.
source/context

How does your marriage work what with travelling, shows and such? A bit of a personal question but I’m sincerely intrigued.

It works, although it bumps sometimes, especially if we’ve been apart more than a month. On the good hand, we rarely run into a situation where one of us is on tour and the other is at home feeling lonely. We get lots of wonderful reunions out of it.
source/context

How would each of you describe the other in bed?

Amanda tends to sleep on the right and often sleeps naked. She’s cuddly, much less talky than I am, unless she decides that she wants to talk. She likes sex. She reads in bed before sleeping more than I do these days.

↳ i’m taking “in bed” literally here. neil is selling himself short: he’s an excellent cuddler. he also likes sex a lot.
we tend to use bed as our space to talk about our actual relationship and our sex life…we don’t do that shit over dinner. it’s the place where we can hold each other, be safe, away from work, phones and other people and let all of our feelings out.
we’ve recently been apart for about a month until a few days ago and this morning we’d planned to get up at 8:15 am and go to a yoga class and lunch together before hitting this reddit at 1 pm. instead, we woke up at 8 and had sex and airings-out and arguments and makings-out and generally caught up about all of our feelings and shit (it’s been a month, after all) until noon. when we’ve been apart for a while, that tends to be necessary when we get back together. and we prioritize it.
neil also sleeps strictly with a pillow made of beans and i sleep strictly with a squishy tempurpedic pillow that i also drag around on tour with me.
and we both grind our teeth, so we both use night guards. it’s really un-sexy and therefore sexy as hell.
source/context

Hello lovely people. When you collaborate for instance with the 8×8 and Evenings with you two, how do you figure out what to perform?

It depends. If I’ve written something new and I want to find out what people think of it, I will perform that.
I have lots of poems and short stories and such, so it’s whim what gets chosen. Amanda has hundreds of songs.
Amanda and I in collaboration have a VERY small repertoire of songs we do. If she’s playing Ukulele, there’s Makin’ Whoopie, Psycho, The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side (A magnetic fields song), and if she’s on piano, Jump! I Google You, and the 8in8 Problem With Saints. (Most of these are on the EVENING WITH NEIL AND AMANDA CD).
Amanda does her own set list for what she wants to do, as do I, although it’s not unknown for one of us to make request of the other, or to suggest a story or a song that we thing works for that evening.
source/context

Any plans to do more “Evening with”‘s together, preferably in Europe?

We plan to do them whenever we know we are going to be in the same place at the same time and we feel like it. They are for fun, not our day job, after all.
We’d love to do one in London, for a start.
(I’d generally only want to do European gigs in places where most of the people in the audience spoke English, though. You don’t need to speak English to love a song. You do to listen to a poem or a story.)
source/context

What one thing you’ve both written, story-wise or song-wise, do you think that best expresses why you have a passion for writing and singing, respectively?

for me…. i’d give “the ukulele anthem” a listen. it’s on the new record (on the “amanda disc”)
there’s also a song by the dresden dolls called “sing” that might blow your dress up.
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What kind of tea do you both like?

We both like green tea, and we both like fruity teas. Only one of us likes proper British Tea with milk. I am not going to tell you which one.

↳ YOU’RE SO TRICKY
source/context

To Amanda: how many of those black shirts Neil have?

honestly? like 100.

Does he have them in Black and Slightly-Darker-Black?

no lie: he keeps them in plastic tubs and actually does differentiate between which ones are spanky new and which have been washed A LOT and are now off-black.
bless him
source/context

What is your biggest fear for the future?

My biggest fear for the future is that we’ll kill the oceans. We seem to be well on the way.
I look at things like the TerraMar project – http://theterramarproject.org/ – and hope that they have some kind of chance of delaying things for long enough to turn it around.

my biggest fear for the future is that we won’t revolutionize our way of thinking fast enough to keep the planet habitable. reading up on the current state of affairs, it seems possible that only a massive overthrow of the system is going to ensure that we get to keep hanging out on this ball of dirt. i like it here. it’s nice. i hope we figure it out.
source/context

Over the past few years you both have been accosted with questions, comments, and general bitterness from people who say not-so-nice things about your relationship. How do you cope with it at the end of the day, when you’ve been married for two years now and yet again someone has to say something spiteful or ignorant?

I had run into nasty people on the web before I married Amanda, but marrying her opened the door on a whole new level of unpleasantness. It was like lifting up a rock and seeing what squirms underneath. And then slowly I started to realise that an awful lot of the nastiest haters appeared to be one person cutting and pasting away, and industriously spending every evening googling my name and Amanda’s and posting strangely unpleasant dispatches from an alternate universe. And then I felt very sorry for that person, because it doesn’t seem like much of a life.

this is a good question.
first off: neither neil nor were strangers to haters when we met each other. from the first outing of the dresden dolls in 2000 (my first band, which was just me and one other guy) in boston, i was confronted with the amazing phenomenon that is People Who Love To Spend Their Time Hating & Criticizing Artists. back in 2003 when the dresden dolls built a proper website, i even made sure our designer put in a section called “hate mail”. and this was pre-social network, pre-myspace. these were just plain old hate letters, via email. that site is still up, and the hate mail section lives on!!!: http://www.dresdendolls.com/hatemail.html
there was even, back in the heyday of livejournal, an entire community was dedicated to hating my band.
neil can chime in about his own pre-marrying-amanda-palmer experiences, but he certainly had his own field of trolls and neil-gaiman-haters before i showed up.
so it came as no surprise to both of us that our union ushered in a whole new exciting era of hatred for the trolls and critics.
on the upside, coping with it when you have a partner who TOTALLY UNDERSTANDS how it feels to read a load of bullshit comments is WAY easier, and i think it’s one of the big reasons neil and i are and were attracted to each other. our job is weird. we’re constantly in the public trying to communicate and make art and it’s impossible to do that nowadays without facing haters and trolls….and it can feel really lonely.
we also serve to edit one another. both of us try to protect each other from taking troll-bait. we’ve traded “DELETE THAT TWEET YOU’LL ONLY ENCOURAGE THEM” emails and phone calls with one another more than once. it’s nice to feel like we’re part of an engine room that way….we protect and help each other.
i WAS a bit shocked when i realized that there was a whole subculture of WOMEN who were basically grumbling “fuck that bitch amanda palmer for dating/marrying my favorite author. now i can’t like either of them”. it seemed to me emblematic of the entire problem with feminism…a bunch of women scratching their own (and each other’s) eyeballs out because they’ve been fed the cultural lie that there’s only one place at the table for a single power, instead of understanding that the more we support and encourage each other as women, the more powerful and happy we can be on this fucking planet.
and the truth is…it’s just part of the job. i have accepted that doing this job (especially as a woman, which generally means i’m more of a target) means that “learning to deal with the trolls” is part of my everyday to-do list. you get good at it.
and honestly….the more i do it and learn about this part of the universe, the more i approach the haters and yellers with compassion. the more i look, the more hurt i see, and the less i feel like yelling back. from where i’m standing, the ones screaming the loudest probably need the biggest hugs.
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I have this feeling that every show. Every single second of every single show was spontaneous and compelling and different from one show to the next. How did you pick and choose what made it to the “An Evening with” album? And how did it not turn into a 133 cd box set?

It was hard. We listened and we sighed a lot.
We gave away hours of digital extras and an extra CD to people who supported the kickstarter, and if you get the version at http://amandapalmer.net/ you can get lots of digital extras…
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You have said before that you both have an open relationship and I have a couple questions about that. Why did you two decide to open your relationship? And what are some of the benefits to your relationship style?
For those of us who are in open relationships it is really awesome to see public figures who are open about it. More acceptance!

glad to be of service. hopefully you saw the longer thread answering this…
for the record, i actually know quite a few people (artists and otherwise) who are in open relationships, but don’t go around broadcasting it. neither do we. i don’t really hang with the poly community or go on “open marriage” pride marches. that being said, there aren’t a lot of people trying to oppress our way of doing things, not actively, at least. if people showed up with pitchforks on my lawn (and my friends’ lawns) regularly, doing some parades might start to look more tasty.

I would have been perfectly comfortable being not public about it. But Amanda was interviewed, and asked directly, and, as is her wont, she answered directly. (IT was at http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2012/09/20/amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-open-relationship). I discovered once out that I didn’t actually mind being out at all. The credit for that one is all Amanda’s, though.
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If there was anyone to ask the horse sized duck or duck sized horses question it would be this couple. Reddit has let me down. Neil and Amanda, would you rather fight a horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?

That’s the sort of thing that people ALWAYS ask on the web though. Here, I answered it at http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lomoamigos/2011/03/10/catching-up-with-lomoamigo-neil-gaiman
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How do the two of you force yourselves to write and work when you aren’t in the mood?

I can’t speak for Amanda. In the old days I used to do it mostly by telling myself that if I didn’t write I wouldn’t eat, and neither would my children. That always worked. Also, it was true.
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What is your best advice for keeping the relationship going when dating an artist can be frustrating and lonely at times?

I think you have to accept that an artist also has a relationship with his or her art and his or her fans: you are in an open relationship whether you like it or not. Give the artist room to go into the place they create (literally or metaphorically). And love them when they can’t remember where they put their keys.
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Neil, what’s your favorite of Amanda’s Songs?
Amanda, what’s your favorite of Neil’s writings?
and what do you love about it?

My favourite of Amanda’s songs is The Bed Song. It’s clever and honest and moving, and it’s like a novel about a relationship compressed into in 6 minutes.

my favorite writing of neil’s is probably the new book (the ocean at the end of the lane). but before that, it was the short stories collections (smoke and mirrors in particular).
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Two part question here
Being polyamorous I’m often curious how others arrive at opening their relationships. How did you two breach the subject of an open marriage and was it a result of rigorous tour schedules or have all your relationships been open?
Was the song lost written because you actually lost your wallet or did the metaphor just make sense in relation to other losses going on at that time?

We both came from closed relationships (although Amanda had tried all sorts of relationships before that one). We both wanted to be with each other, but also we wanted more than that. From the very beginning of the relationship, in early 2009, possibly even before we started actually going out, we knew we wanted to be free to be with other people when we were away, and that we wanted to build the kind of a relationship in which that would bring us closer. So far it’s working pretty well.

Do you think that you would still have an open relationship even if you weren’t away from each other on tours etc?

I don’t know. It works okay currently because we have people we can kiss all over the world. If we both lived in a small town and never left, we might decide it was easier to have a closed relationship. Or we might not.
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What’s it like having an open marriage? Are there relationships that seem to detract from your marriage rather than enhance it? How do you handle complications that arise?

It’s good. So far, it’s really good.
We’re very aware of each other, and we would not allow another relationship to imperil what we have.
We talk. And talk. And talk. And hug a lot. And talk some more. And then do whatever needs to be done in the real world.
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Amanda: I saw your show in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, it was amazing. Your Lou Reed cover made my night. Do you have any ideas for what we could do as a society or legislatively to foster more free creativity and to spread culture more freely? Your TED talk was awesome.

thank you! glad you liked copenhagen. that show was epic (and we loved denmark in general).
re: your question….since we are technically here to discuss our new “evening with” record, i can tell you exactly what you can do. support as many artists as you can DIRECTLY. neil and i were just chatting about whether or not to include the amazon link to the record in the intro (above). we included it, but i do often feel like i’m on a personal mission to get people USED to not taking the easy way out and only ordering music via iTunes and Amazon and the channels they’re used to. a lot of artists are trying hard to keep control of their content and their interactions on their own portals and websites, and it’s almost always better to by direct from the artist than to go through a third party.
that being said: here’s the direct link to order/download the record: http://amandapalmer.net/
and it’s on amazon and itunes too….if you wanna.
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Neil: Who would be your favourite supporting character in any novel?
Amanda: What song would you turn to to cheer yourself the f*ck up?

Puddleglum, in The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis.

i tend to get happy every single time i hear the opening sounds of “bittersweet symphony” by the verve. i also got insanely happy in a cab in london the other day when i heard “dont know much about history” by sam cooke. i just couldn’t not be happy. that was surprising. but there you go
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I have two questions: Amanda, is there a REAL Blake (in Blake says?)? And Neil, in “I Google You” were you googling amanda?

I wrote “I Google You” when a singer named Peri Lyons asked me to write a torch song for her cabaret. (I only tend to write songs when asked.) When Amanda and I first met properly, in August 2008, we were talking about Sinatra, and I mentioned that I’d written a torch song, and sang it to her. She went and got a recorder and made me sing it again. I was amazed and delighted when, a week later, I saw her perform it on YouTube in San Francisco.
And googling Amanda is about as pointless as googling me: there’s too damn much stuff out there, so I’ve never bothered. Googling should be reserved, late at night, for that girlfriend who broke up with you when you were both sixteen, to try and figure out if she’s still alive and where in the world she is these days.
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Will there be “An Evening with …” at Bard to introduce you two to the community?

There was already an Evening with.. at Bard, in April.
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If you were to wake up to discover that you had swapped bodies the morning before a show, what would you do?

to be honest, i would be so distracted by having an exciting new penis that i don’t believe i’d think very much about the show.
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What helped influence you early on (music, books, people…), and how did it influence you?
I can’t tell either of you thank you enough…

you’re so welcome.
there’s actually a track on the new record called “judy blume” where i talk in the introduction to the song about how i realized – all of a sudden – that i’d never recognized her massive influence on me, as a woman, as a writer, as a embarrassing-truth-sharer.
and that’s after a dozen years of journalists asking me the damn question. it was a real revelation. it made me realize that there are so many things that just don’t make it onto the list because we generally don’t think outside the box when it comes to huge things that have influenced us in addition to the obvious shit.
off the top of my head right now, for fun:
obvious that has influenced me as a child/teenager: -the beatles
-the beach boys
-madonna
-bach
-michael jackson
-cyndi lauper
-prince
-MTV in general, esp watching 120 minutes
-the cure
-the legendary pink dots
-nick cave
-my parents & step parents (all 5 or 6 of them)
-they might be giants
-john hughes’ movies
-chopin
-the wall (the film and the album)
-santa sangre (the film)
-the doors (the band, that is, not the things you use to separate rooms)
AND not so obvious (and less “credible”) things that influenced me:
-my parents copy of “the joy of sex”
-the brady bunch
-judy blume
-weird al yankovic
-the choir music i sang in the episcopal church (aged about 6-13)
-one single novel by jackie collins called “rock star” that i read when i was 12
-the woods outside the house i grew up in-
-my next door neighbor anthony
-my older brother karl’s record collection, which i dubbed almost in it’s entirety
-my older sister, HUGELY (for better or worse)
-the porn magazines i managed to get a hold of
-all radio and television commercials everywhere (this one freaks me out. i can sing TV commercial jingles that i –
-have memorized but haven’t heard since i was like 7, but i often forget the lyrics to MY OWN FUCKING SONGS).
-that weird shit on backs of cereal boxes
-the graffiti on the side of that abandoned house on the walk to school
and
-the boxes in the attic
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I don’t really have a relevant question, so I’m just gonna ask how many toasters you have at home?

There is only one toaster and it is TERRIBLE. It eats toast, and then I have to turn it on its side and shake it to get the toast out. And toast crumbs come out too and go all over the kitchen.
Why do I have such a toaster? Surely I can afford to replace it. Sigh.
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First question, does it surprise you when your works are challenged or censored? Is it a moment of pride when something impassions people so much that they attempt to ban it?
Second question, as a (fairly) young writer, I was hoping for words of advice when it comes to publishing a piece of work (poetry, short story, novella). Anything?

It’s mingled pride at being thought worthy of censorship and grumpiness at the people who think that the solution to ideas is to try and stop them.
Keep writing. Don’t be disheartened when stories don’t sell.
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A more writery Doctor Who question for Mr. Gaiman: Between your two television episodes and the 50th anniversary short story, you’ve written a bit of the Eleventh Doctor (and quite enjoyably, I might add). If you were to write a story involving any other Doctor, who would it be and why?

The Doctor is the Doctor. Matt Smith wasn’t cast when I wrote the first draft of The Doctor’s Wife.
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Neil, when I was in college, several professors told me to read your work as they though it would inspire me. I did, and it did. I’ve been writing for some years now and put a few short stories out to float about in the world. People seem to like them, but here’s my struggle: I love writing novels. I’ve written quite a few, but every time I go to re-read and then send them out on their own, I find something else that needs fixing, something else that could use some tweaking. How do you decide that yours are done? Also, what is your go-to writer’s fuel? Do you have a special writer’s hat?

There’s always a point where you have to let a story go. Art isn’t finished, as many people before me have pointed out, only abandoned. And eventually you abandon your new child and hope that you’ll get it right next time, or the time after that, and you never do.
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Stephen King said, “The Road to hell is paved with adverbs,” yet you use truck loads full of adverbs. Is Mr. King too confident in his statement or is it just an English thing or perhaps a stylistic choice?

The puritans had a saying “God loveth adverbs, and careth not how good but how well”. Which would seem to indicate that God is on the Road to Hell…
I think Steve’s rules work well for him, Elmore Leonard’s worked fine for him, and mine (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/) work just fine for me.
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Amanda! Have you thought of doing a Nirvana covers album?

i have to learn to play the lute first. then and only then.
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I’m thinking of getting a tattoo of Merv and Destiny playing a board game. What game should they be playing?

NOT TWISTER.
My vote would be for Scrabble. Or Monopoly. Either way, Destiny wins.
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I was attending a TEDx event, where your talk was played. Whenever I feel lost in life or need something uplifting, I watch it.

you’re so very welcome. i’m so glad the TED talk is resonating with so many people.
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guys, love you both to pieces… i have a small tiny complaint though… just downloaded the bundle and quality of sound is very arguable… i mean at some point it’s hard to hear what is said…what’s up with that?

really? we think it sounds pretty amazing…which tracks are you having a hard time with?
the intro to the 1st record itself (where margaret cho is bantering) may arguably be the “loosest” of the recordings, but it was so fucking funny/good we wanted to keep it. if you’re judging based on that, i wouldn’t worry….it gets and stays better.
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How do you decide on the language, tenses and “voice” you will sue to write in? ie the mechanics of writing in first person vs third, active or passive voice, descriptions and flow versus adjectives, dialog?

You decide in the same way that you decide how to tell a friend a story about something that happened to you. Take a deep breath and start…
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Will we see a sequel to your acclaimed young adult book, The Troll Twins of Underbridge Academy?

As soon as I can get people to write it for me. Bwahahaha. Er, heh-heh-heh.
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I am curious about your opinion of the movie adaptation of Stardust. I absolutely love the book, and I absolutely love the movie–but the two bear little resemblance to each other. Do you feel that the movie was able to uphold the spirit of your work even with a mostly altered plot?

I like to think of the two Stardusts as the Earth-1 and Earth-2 versions.
I produced the movie, and lots of things in it, like the “What do stars do, shine…” showdown were mine. They felt right for a movie but wrong for a book.
Sometimes I think I’d love to see a stage production or TV adaptation that was closer to the book, though: more melancholy, for a start…
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Would you rather have feet sized ears or ear size feet?

Ear sized feet. Some ears are pretty big.
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Neil – One night, due to a lot of problems I was having, I was contemplating going home and offing myself, and I was leaving a friend’s house, and he handed me Death: The High Cost of Living, telling me I HAD to read it, but to make sure I brought it home to him the next day. I took it and went home, decided to read it before doing anything else, and I loved it so much that I read it about three times in a row, then went to sleep without doing anything stupid.
I’m proud of you, and really glad that the story helped save you from doing anything foolish.
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Neil, I know you were dear friends with Diana Wynne Jones, who is one of my absolute favorite authors of all time. I’m trying to convince friends to read her books. Which one do you think it would be best to have them start with?

It depends on the person. Her books are so different, figure out what the person you are talking to likes, then suggest a book based on that. I love Archer’s Good best of all, but that’s just me.
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Why did Delight become Delirium?
Since I am smart enough to know you will never answer this on an internet forum I will also ask…will you ever tell the reason in comics?
I went to the Sandman convention, Fiddler’s Green, in 2004 and it is still one of the most amazing experiences. Any highlights for you from the convention?
I must say to anyone reading this I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Neil Gaiman twice and he is an amazing, warm, and friendly man. Thank you Neil for all your work and your great relationship with your fans. Shameless plug for my subreddit /r/Sandman[1]
If you could go over there an make a post Neil that would be amazing. If not you are still amazing. Much love to you both.

I’ll go and find it. And thank you for the kind words.
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What are your views on Welcome To Night Vale? (Former, writing half) How do you feel about all the criticism TOATEOFL got? To clarify, I loved it, just interested.

I think I must have missed all the criticism. I saw lots of lovely reviews, a couple of not-so-nice, and the Book Award nominations, and the Best of Year appearances. I don’t remember releasing a book that got so much love on its immediate release. (It’s very nice, by the way, and refreshing.)
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Amanda – How do you explain your assertion in your “WHERE ALL THIS KICKSTARTER MONEY IS GOING” blog entry that the CDs alone would cost you $105,000 when your initial kickstarter goal was $100,000?
Did you simply not do enough math to realize that your goal amount wouldn’t even cover the CDs, let alone the LPs, 7″s, Art Books, Neil & Kyle books, a tour and other rewards?

If 3,000 people had preordered the CDs, and the Kickstarter had only reached $100,000, then she wouldn’t have needed to spend $100,000 on CDs. 25,000 people ordered CDs, so she needed to spend more on making them.

↳ bingo
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My husband and I donate monthly to RAINN, simply because I too am a victim of sexual assault in the military. Recently I saw on their website an opportunity to volunteer in the speakers bureau. Ever since I reported my assault I’ve told myself I would do something and make a difference like a motivational speaker or something and this seems like the perfect avenue to start. The problem is that it’s still a very sensitive subject for me and I am terrified just to send in the application. So my question is have you had any interaction with RAINN’s speakers bureau and what was it like? What sort of questions were they asked and how did they seem to handle it?

I’ve never worked with RAINN’s speakers bureau, although I’ve worked with them and donated to them for many years now. You should talk to them directly.
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Neil, You’ve stated that you have sequal ideas for most of your books, but may not have the time to write them. In the past years, we’ve seen continuations of both the Dune books and the Lord of the Rings books, based on half-finished notes left by the original authors and guided by their heirs. Will you be leaving behind similar notes one day (many years from now, hopefully)? If so, who do you think will take up the mantle, and which of your books do you feel is most suited for posthumous sequals?

Oh, I hope that doesn’t happen. In a perfect world I’ll live long enough to write ALL THE BOOKS.
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My question is for Neil (Amanda, your stuff is awesome too!), but when you write — how much time do you spend researching? When reading American Gods, it felt well researched and I loved the femme fatale characters, but it was very involved and a lot of your stories feel that way which is one of the many things that makes them so spectacular!

I think I spent about 35 years researching American Gods. Only one or two years actually researching it while writing though.
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Which of you is the better cook? Do you have a favorite meal to make together?

I don’t know which of us is a better cook, but I enjoy cooking more.
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I always hear things about an American Gods HBO Series, pilots and greenlights and all sorts of things. Whats the truth?

There is an American Gods TV series in the works. It’s no longer with HBO. The moment that things are ready to be announced I am sure they will be, either legitimately or via a leak in a big Hollywood Agency mailroom.
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hello to both of you! my question is for Neil: how do you seem to write the child psyche so well? do you draw from your own childhood experiences?

Yes. That’s pretty much it: it’s the only childhood I went through, after all.
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Neil, as a kid, did your unique outlook on life ever creep your parents out?

I don’t know.
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Neil, which historical figures do you find most fascinating?

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Queen Elizabeth (the first one).
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edited, see source link below for fully comment: …THANKS COOL GUYS. I’m coming to NYC this Saturday to see “An Evening With You” so I’m extremely excited. The related theme between my two long paragraphs (forgive me people of reddit!) is that you two are champions for what I believe to be the good in the world and I am really thankful there are people like you out there. There are a lot of champions for evil out there, and it’s nice to remember that while there is less on the other side, they are still a force to be reckoned with.

That’s wonderful. (See you on Saturday.)
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