EL FUCKING NIÑO, in which i post no pictures of pirates.
so i freeze…it’s always been like this.
in the space of one week i played so many shows, did so many things, met so many people, and created so much content that it completely blocked my fucking mental drain.
then, typically, i was afraid to blog because i started to get scared that there would just be too much shit to put in one place.
and there would be. i don’t know how to figure this one out. i need a blogging fairy.
one who doesn’t keep track of my emotions and the inner process of my life but just collects the awesomeness and filters it to you in a nice, cleverly packaged way.
i sort of have that fairy, and it’s called twitter. i have simply started dumping content there, and it’s extremely useful. but it doesn’t feel as substantial as the blog.
and amidst all of the content, i feel like my life gets lost.
i resist documenting when i feel tired. i don’t want to be beholden to the life-as-life-archive. i also don’t want it to lie fallow. i dart back and forth and to and fro-yo.
so i’m sitting here on hera’s parents porch, with the cat, who is fluffy, and dumb and couldn’t figure out while scratching on the dining room window all last night while neil and i were having dinner that the fucking porch door was actually open 16 feet away, and i am committing myself to a one-sitting blog before my soundcheck in Christchurch (what a fucked up name for a town. no, really. eek. but the snarky folks, they call it “crimeschurch”, which makes me happy).
it will be a blog in which i will not post photos from the opera house, i will not post clips of me singing with paul kelly from melbourne, or pictures of my ninja gigs in clothing stores in brisbane, or clips of me & mikelangelo and a boy dressed like a pirate who goes by the name of georgie but i think whose name is sebastian signing “blitzkrieg bop” off someone’s iPhone to accordion and ukulele in an art gallery in front of a giant photo of a naked girl.
i will not post about the evelyn evelyn record pre-order and all of your questions, i will not post about traveling to byron bay and the beautiful sea and the shooting stars i saw and the new accordion song mikelangelo wrote and how we made everybody waltz to leonard choen and i will not write about the fringe in adelaide and the wonderful shows i saw and i will not post links to all the amazing musicians i’ve been making music with and i will not talk about the girl in bangalow who sat next to me with a book of sheet music and turned the pages so i could sing a song i couldn’t remember and i won’t talk about how i played barefoot there and how nice ladies made us fresh chai and i won’t talk about any of that. i’m going to give it a rest, because that’s all i ever talk about in my fucking blog and i don’t talk about it; my life, as blogged.
that’s what my life looks like. i do a very good job of projecting it and selecting the photos that capture the highest essence of the party, the way we all do.
and i create my own image, for you, because i want you to love me, of course, and i run my own existence as a business of love and joy and greed like we all sort of do and what do you know…generally it works very well.
right now i’m tired, and i just lifted myself out of the first full-blown depression i’ve fallen into in years.
it scared the shit out of me. now it’s gone, so i can think about it.
i was riding on fumes and coffee and manic energy until i hit new zealand and the minute i landed i just crashed, and i crashed and the ground was hard and pebbly, and i hurt myself.
i had absolutely no energy to do fucking anything. my mind went blank. i couldn’t focus on work, i couldn’t smile, i couldn’t hold up a decent conversation.
i just wanted to go back to bed all the time. i wondered if i was sick.
all this coincided, not coincidentally, with meeting back up with neil.
himself didn’t depress me, but i felt doubly depressed that i was obviously hitting my own tour wall and i didn’t want to be a downer in the short time we had together.
so i stayed as quiet as possible. which never works.
i’ve gotten so used to being on my own and negotiating my own moods and ups and downs on my own terms, sitting in corners of cafes and letting the dark clouds pass.
this is why i was very happy to be single for so long; i didn’t like inflicting myself on others. i liked my love affair with the Whole World, because the Whole World didn’t miss me very much when i ducked into the basement for a few days to write. or sulk. or go on a stupid bender of carelessness and non-health. and the Whole World would happily embrace me, having hardly noticed my absence, when i returned to be the life of the party. and i’ve always found myself in relationships where i start feeling the shackles of doom tying down my hands, and the basement doors swinging wide.
neil is about the most accommodating partner i’ve ever had. but i still, in my infinite selfishness, want the freedom to do all things at all times with no questions asked and nobody to report to and no alarms and no surprises and a handshake of carbon monoxide thank you very much no longer empty like a cat on a stick…etc. you know. i’m an impulsive little twit. i’ve spent my whole life trying to carefully construct a pattern of architecture around my days and nights that allows this compulsion to create joy and not sorrow and hopefully a minimal amount of stress on the world and it’s inhabitants (ninja gig, anyone? please bring beer and cupcakes.)
i want EVERYTHING.
but even more
I want to be Alone with the Whole World.
does that make sense?
neil, though, he understands this very, very well at some level, because at some level he’s been dating the Whole World for years.
this is, i think, one of the reasons we love each other so much.
i said, the other night: i’m already in a relationship, a really hardcore one, but it’s open. you know…she doesn’t mind if i see other people.
the only problem i have with your lover, he said, is that she’s kind of obsessed with you.
but, he added, she’s had you her whole life. and she’ll have you after i’m gone.
she likes you, i said, she’s just really possessive. she’s really irritating. and she talks too much.
we’ll work it out, he said.
i love him so much.
and so we will. i have a deep instinct that it’ll be fine. a pain in the ass, but fine.
we’re hitting that point in the relationship where the heavy lifting comes in. we don’t see each other enough, which is great and terrible.
we’re building our relationship over the phone and in bursts of compressed time a few days a month. it seems crazy. but it works, when it does. and when it doesn’t, it’s the same sort of not-working that brenda from the bank and steven from the station have to collide with when they gleefully collapse into each other’s arms on friday night after working their monotonous 9-5 jobs and after 15 minutes can’t fucking agree on whether to go out or stay in or what fucking video to rent. same shit, different backdrop. we all have our bad habits. my habit is a criminal need for freedom.
and this habit of mine not only makes deep love relationships with Amanda Palmer trying at best for most normal people (thankfully neil is not so normal so it works pretty well); it also makes me very frustrating to work with. my team will get a laundry list of marching instructions from me and then i’ll disappear for 5 days on a crazed project that has nothing to do with any current tasks at
hand. it makes me, more or less, unmanageable, since i am managing myself…second to second. the only thing i can hope for is that my team can manage, with some degree of accuracy, how to harness the windmills and solar panels to make use of the predictably unpredictable sunshine-and-hurricane-pattern that is amanda palmer’s carefree existence.
I AM EL FUCKING NIÑO
and for those of you who don’t HABLA ESPANOL
EL FUCKING NIÑO is spanish for
THE FUCKING NIÑO
i am a herd of cats and a drunk shepherd with alzheimer’s all at once.
i am the walrus.
i kicked myself out.
i stopped drinking coffee for a few days and went through a withdrawal. for real.
i had never thought coffee was so SERIOUS. that shit is lethal. my coffee withdrawal was a small-scale version of that terrifying trainspotting sequence with the freak-ghost-baby crawling on the ceiling.
i got back on my mat and practiced and sat.
i still have so much to learn.
i did get one present that made me really happy at just the right time (from the australian boy-as-pirate named sebastian who sang “blitzkrieg bop” with us, as a matter of fact, and he gave it to me totally independent of the fact that i made him get up and sing with us) that i wanted to show you. it came in a brown envelope and i expected it to me a long letter but instead it was just this.
a medal.
that is an empty passion fruit in the background, so you know. it wasn’t meant to be ironic or symbolic.
i had to play a gig during this nasty depressed few days, in wellington. if you watch the first few clips (which i will not post here, because this is not that kind of blog), you’ll see a dead face.
then i come alive. i always do, it’s very hard not too.
i’ve had to do that a lot.
when brian and i were driving each other nutso in the band, i’d sometimes feel like we were a twosome let loose on a fucking day pass to entertain the masses.
but there were very few shows where i couldn’t pull my shit together pretty quickly.
in wellington i started the show by giving away the fruit from backstage. that helped.
nobody was going to eat it anyway.
playing for humans who want to hear me usually burns off the bad energy like spattering water on a hot skillet.
sometimes it takes an entire show. playing a gig in a bad mood to humans who DON’T want to hear you (for instance, when supporting pretty much anybody on tour) is like Death.
i remembered my last wellington gig from exactly one year before, to the day.
in the same club.
same dressing room, same promotor, groundhog day.
and last year, i was in a shit mood as well. i was in such a shit mood i wrote a little ukulele song about it called new zealand, which i am not going to post a link to here because goddamit this is not that kind of blog. i wouldn’t have remembered being in a shit mood had i not written that funny little song backstage. but i did.
here are the words. it can be THAT kind of blog:
new zealand new zealand
you’ve caught me on a awful day
my little life is all fucked up
my psyche is in dissaray
new zealand new zealand
i wish i could enjoy you more
i wish i had more time
to see your cliffsides & your blackened shores
new zealand new zealand
i don’t know why i tour this way
trapped inside an aeroplane and
twittering the scenery
new zealand new zealand
i feel like shit what can i say
my period is 6 days late
my pubic hair is turning gray
but i don’t believe in the beauty standard
and theres no way that i’m pregnant
so it’s technically
ok
everything is so beautiful here
the people on cuba street drinking their beer
i wish i could stay here and never go home
i wish i could be just like holly hunter in the piano
and not have to talk to anyone even though there’s nothing wrong with my voice
and just play piano and make love to hot local boys
new zealand new zealand
you caught me at the end of tour
my willpower’s collapsing
and i cannot do this anymore
new zealand new zealand
my song is coming to an end
i hope you have enjoyed it
and i also hope i get my period
i also hope i haven’t grossed you out
but that’s what you get when you ask me to write a song about your country in twenty minutes
(ok, i take it back. here’s a link to last year’s performance. i’m sorry. i can’t help it. wait a second. fuck that. google it if you care enough. i am sticking by my principals. yes i am.)
anyway, it really depressed the fuck out of me, to sing this song again one year later.
it was like: here you are, a year later, in the same fucking club, playing the same songs, in the same shit mood. what gives, palmer?
at least this time my period wasn’t late.
hoorah.
but it really did start to make me feel slightly crazy.
and that reminds me.
something awful happened a few months ago, when i was in france. i don’t think i told you this. i was too busy posting happy pictures.
i played a small show outside of bordeaux in a town called mont-de-marsin.
i’d never played there before, and i was looking forward to a happy little day trip in the sunny south of france.
WRONG – i was in a shit mood, tired out as usual, and it was a shit trip and it was freezing. never mind.
i got there with my friend geeta (both of us had comically lost our ATM cards and were reveling in our stupid plight).
i was chatting with the promotor, who gave us a lift to the club from the train station, about how pleased i was to be playing mont-de-marsin for the first time.
but ahmandah, she said, frenchly, you haff bean playing ere some years ago!
i was quite embarrassed.
really? i asked.
not only had i bean playing ere some years ago, i had, according to the promotor, played THIS EXACT same club some years ago, with the dolls.
that didn’t worry me. it happens all the time.
you’d be surprised, but really it does. i’ll roll into a town and into a venue and a whole series of memories will come flooding back.
o THIS place!!! right. dressing rooms over there, bathroom there, this stage, this sound guy, this whole thing. right.
all the details were hidden away somewhere but not attached to the name of the town, or the venue.
except this time, to my horror, i walked in, expecting my memory to be quickly jogged, for everything to look familiar suddenly…and it didn’t.
i didn’t recognize the entrance, the stage, the backstage, the kitchen….nothing. i thought there must be some kind of fucked up misunderstanding but there, plain as day, was a huge dresden dolls poster, signed and stuck to the wall. i wanted to cry.
I DON’T REMEMBER THIS.
when i thought about it, i figured out what must have happened. the darkest days of the dresden dolls – what i would dub our Shittiest And Most Emotionally Fucked Tour Ever 2006, ran us through france. and i must have been in some sort of blackout. but my own mind frightens me. it loses details, people, names, faces, daily. can it lose an entire city like that?
i guess so.
my hour is up. this is lucky. i would continue to write about my woes and probably get increasingly more wanky for another hour were it not time to go to soundcheck.
and later i’ll come back and tell you all about the musical magicalness, and the pirates, and cabages and kings and all that.
by the way, because people have been asking me all the time:
yes, i do read the comments you guys leave on the blog.
if you have something really, really important to relate or it’s private it’s better to email: letters (at) amandapalmer (dot) net.
and i’m out.
and so you know, i love you.
x
AFP (and the fluffy cat, whose name is “gudrun drofn”, which means “god rune” in icelandic, which has a whole backstory but you’ll have to ask hera about that.
and with that, i will break my fucking blog rule and post a link to her site, because she and her cats and her music are awesome: www.herasings.com. i am strong. i break rules. i am free.)
i wish i could enjoy you more.
