art story from felix…and, my personal art-splosion
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(public post)
hello dears. again…lots of new people have joined in the past few days.
greetings from jason’s houseboat in seattle. we’re doing our everett animal shelter show tomorrow and we’ve come up with an animal song medley…don’t ask.
from the looks of the comments the other day i’ll see a handful of you
there. if you’re coming, just hang out before/after the show…i’ll be
flitting around with a baby in my arms.
i’ve flown cassandra long (yes..the “blackstar” artist, who’s also my housemate and good friend and owner of a fish named Everything) out to seattle to be the
baby-wingman, she’s going to be coming with me up to vancouver while i attend TED for the week. it’s my first time spending a whole stretch of four days not full-time mothering, and i wanted someone really close to me to keep watch over the little man. so you’ll see her, and she’ll also be with me at the vancouver show.
yesterday jason and i challenged ourselves to write eleven songs.
four of our own, and three together.
we wound up writing three. he wrote one, i wrote one, and we finished “the butt song”. which i gotta say is pretty good. the song i wrote is in that vein of long, confessional, almost stream-of-consiousness blog-in-song-forms songs.
i really like it, for what it is. i think we might spend the next few
days refining and recording it, just because we’re here and jason has a
home studio and
….drum roll….
WE CAN, because patreon.
so….prepare yourselves. i might hit you with a long soulful blog-in-song form with accordion and back-up baby.
you know what? i really like creating like this. i fucking love it.
i am trying not to take it for granted. i am trying to be really deeply grateful that you 7,000+ folks are here and i can do this….
i feel like it’s not a coincidence that the patreon and the baby came at the same time.
if you ask around, i have a pretty bad habit of leaving things unfinished, of making things and getting ideas and leaving them half-cooked because things get too convoluted and complicated.
right now the patreon is fueling me to create and, more importantly, FINISH
THINGS without thinking too hard, which is the only way i can get
anything done now with motherhood-brain.
the possibility of making NOW and releasing TOMORROW is keeping me from dipping into the funk that usually keeps things mentally shelved, if that makes sense.
the artists in the house can probably relate to this: usually i get a song or start a song and don’t finish it because the mountain ahead of the song…the actions i have to go through to release the damn thing….just looks too steep from the bottom. i’m inspired by immediacy, i’m drawn to instant gratification. i don’t think that’s too strange.
and i don’t think this is a bad thing.maybe it’s not the best way of always making music, all kinds of music, forever…but for now, it’s what i need.
i can’t think a year ahead. i can’t really think five months ahead. i’m finding it hard to think five days ahead.
but knowing i can make and purge right now is about the best gift i could imagine given my general proclivities and the baby on my hip. so here we go….as lou reed said (in this fantastic song from “new york” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPkVt7U0Gvs …it’s the beginning of a great adventure*.
……..
and now, today’s art story….
i was really pleased that felix got involved in this one, because he’s a fan and a patreon and i’ve never met him. he’s from spain, pamplona to be exact, where the famous bullfights take place. though people are, according to felix, trying to save the bulls.
he’s had a bowie icon as his twitter avatar forever…and when i started work on the secret bowie EP, i noticed on his twitter bio that he was an artist himself. so i reached out and invited him to make something…having no idea what he would create. i like trusting people like that. i think his stuff came out beautifully
and balanced out all the super-close-up other stuff really nicely….thank you felix. i
hope we get to meet someday, and that no bulls get killed when we do.
we stitched the artwork together (thanks superkate) since patreon still only allows one image posts (grumble, and asking all the time)….
the top image is for “life on mars” and the bottom one is “ashes to ashes”.
you can see all the artwork in grand glorious hi-res on the project page:
http://amandapalmer.net/strungoutinheaven/
ok….here’s felix in his own words.
Félix Marqués
I woke up, saw my friend was still asleep, and quietly browsed my phone. Once I knew, I slowly got up and made myself breakfast, and watched everybody on my Twitter feed, especially the artists, mourn the loss. I didn’t want to tell my friend, but I was so glad that I would be the one to break the news once he woke up.
When I was 15, I took the bus to high school with an mp3 player. Along with the Dresden Dolls songs and movie soundtracks and whatnot, there was the
Ziggy Stardust album. I don’t even remember how I got into it, but that music was
on loop through nine months of drawing classes.
Bowie released 28 studio albums throughout his career. In all the years since high school, I have managed to listen to about twelve of them, and only properly know my way around eight or nine. Like the best music, it refuses to immediately lodge itself in your brain. It just doesn’t fit. It’s oblique, you need to look at it and figure out the angles. It requires your attention, and then it stretches you from the inside, like a growing fetus. You’re never quite the same afterwards.
See, Bowie’s entire life was a powerful act of magic: by the time his body left us, his spirit had managed to possess all of us who welcomed it. As long as his work lives, the spell will never be broken, instead only finding more hearts and minds where the Bowie will be housed.
Since the morning he died, every time I’ve tried to make music or conceive an image, he’s in there somewhere, his hand on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that I can strive for more, that I mustn’t lose sight of ant potential for the interesting, beautiful, extraordinary.
Bowie won’t be releasing anything new
anymore. So now we’re all a little more responsible, we all have to try a little bit harder.
I find that exciting.
Twitter: @FelixMarques
……
LOVE
afp
*It might be fun to have a kid that I could kick around
a little me to fill up with my thoughts
A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams
a way of saying life is not a loss
I’d keep the tyke away from school and tutor him myself
keep him from the poison of the crowd
But then again pristine isolation might not be the best idea
it’s not good trying to immortalize yourself
Beginning of a great adventure
Beginning of a great adventure
Why stop at one, I might have ten, a regular TV brood
I’d breed a little liberal army in the wood
Just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar
with their tribe of mutant inbred piglets with cloven hooves
I’d teach ‘em how to plant a bomb, start a fire, play guitar
and if they catch a hunter, shoot him in the nuts
I’d try to be as progressive as I could possibly be
as long as I don’t have to try too much
Beginning of a great adventure
Beginning of a great adventure
Susie, Jesus, Bogart, Sam, Leslie, Jill and Jeff
Rita, Winny, Andy, Fran and Jet
Boris, Bono, Lucy, Ethel, Bunny, Reg and Tom
that’s a lot of names to try not to forget
Carrie, Marlon, Mo and Steve, La Rue and Jerry Lee
Eggplant, Rufus, Dummy, Star and The Glob
I’d need a damn computer to keep track of all these names
I hope this baby thing don’t go too far
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me, hey
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
She says, “Baby, it’s the beginning of a great adventure”
“Babe, beginning of a great adventure”
take a look
It might be fun to have a kid that I could kick around
create in my own image like a god
I’d raise my own pallbearers to carry me to my grave
and keep me company when I’m a wizened toothless clod
Some gibbering old fool sitting all alone drooling on his shirt
some senile old fart playing in the dirt
It might be fun to have a kid I could pass something on to
something better than rage, pain, anger and hurt
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
She says, “Lou, it’s the beginning of a great adventure”
“Lou, Lou, Lou, beginning of a great adventure”
She says, “babe, how you call your lover boy”
“Sylvia, quite you call your lover man”
Songwriters: LEWIS ALLEN REED, LOU REED, MIKE RATHKE
…ps, if you’re reading this in email form click through to comment. i’m readin’
…pps Felix got this post and pointed out that we already met once in bristol…so…MAY WE MEET YET AGAIN.
