(public post)

after 24 hours of labor at home (well, someone's home, at least) with three magical midwives and our doula and loving friend, whitney, we're finally all safely landed on the other side of childbirth...me, neil and little anthony. 

someday i'll tell you the whole story. it was a crazy, beautiful trip.

meanwhile

please forgive my total lack of online presence for a while...i'm so happy to be spending the time away from the the phone and the computer and doing the only thing i want to do right now...at home, in the quiet woods, all three of us falling in love with each other after our long long journey together. we're exhausted.

so much love

afp

(public post) 

hey guys - 

you may have already seen the photos of thursday's NYC Library Surprise on social media...but for those of you who missed it - i posed as a painted, nekkid living statue inspired by damian hirst's "verity" and collected childrens' books in a beautiful pedestal made of bookcases. i let neil title the piece of the day it happened...he picked "truth & consequences". 

(get it?)

there's a whole album of quickie photos here:

https://www.crowdalbum.com/album/55d77326617070395600002c/Amanda-Palmer-As-A-Living-Statue_20150820

i had kyle cassidy there as my official photog (and some other great photographers, krys fox, hayley rosemblum and more, got amazing shots) ....and i will put together a MASSIVO blog-post/webpage with the entire backstory, process, fantabulous shots. 

PLUS (most important) the incredible time-lapse film of the whole day that michael pope is working on with his crew. it took THREE PEOPLE a total of SIX HOURS to do the paint job - and it was incredible, wait til you see it happen hour-by-hour. just awesomeness. 

just letting you know it's in the pipeline.

this would never ever have happened without patreon.

thank you for being here, for making weird-ass shit like this possible.

the world is amazing sometimes.

i love you.

xxx

AFP

p.s. this photo by jade sterling, via facebook.

(public post)

this was also posted to the AFP blog ...patreon is still working on getting multiple photos for blogs possible, but they ain't there yet. i suggest viewing this post in the blog itself, so you can see the AV:

http://blog.amandapalmer.net/20150823/

hi everyone…..

thursday was a magical day, being in new york and doing my surprise statue performance, and i was going to blog about it right away, the next day, on friday.

i didn’t. i will, sometime this week along with a film and stuff for all the wonderful patreon folks (many of who i got to meet in NYC, even though i was shredded that night for the afterparty). in short, it was wonderful and strange and i’ll share the whole story when i get my head together.

but for right now: i got some really sad news that needs to be shared instead.

i’m back in boston. neil and i are leaving in a few days to go have the baby in the woods.

many of you locally have probably already heard through other channels, but for those out of community range, thom martin just left us.

this is thom: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/RESIZED-PastedGraphic-12.png

he was my age. he’s gone.

he was a part of the boston-art family i grew out of. this crazy loft, pan 9, in allston, and the cloud club (my joint in boston where i still live part-time), were like sister-freak collectives in the early 2000s, with members of both houses doing lots of projects together and people moving between the two places, which both threw parties and events. in the early dresden dolls days, most of our shows were either at my house or at pan 9.

steven martin (not that steve martin), thom’s brother, moved into the cloud club in around 2002, brining thom, who was practically like a twin, along with him.

thom moved into pan 9, and after pan 9 burned in a tragic fire in around 2006, thom moved into the dresden dolls rehearsal space in the basement. he was one of our housemates.

we drank a lot together.

and thom was a graphic designer, a great one, and he helped us a lot.

he designed our first record. he and i stayed up late hours in steve’s apartment, and in mine, working on the design of the disc and getting it perfect. i still thin it’s one of the most beautiful things we ever put out. all of the handiwork and text and flowers over lisa gordon’s original photo is thom’s. he slaved over it to make it beautiful. open it up. the gatefold was his idea. he created all those frames and chose all those fonts. it was all thom.

the dresden dolls - self titled album cover:

http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/unnamed-1-410x362.jpg

this is the poster thom designed for our second album’s record release party (“yes, virginia”) in boston: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/unnamed-2.jpg

while googling, i came across a photo i don’t think i’ve ever seen (or if i have, i haven’t seen it in 10+ years)….

it must have been taken by a boston globe photographer. top floor of the cloud club. thom is the one on his phone, because he was like that.

steve is next to him in the dark green shirt & brown pants. fuck, we all look so LITTLE: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/unnamed-3-410x238.jpg

possibly most importantly, work-wise….you can still see thom’s beautiful work on the dresden dolls website; he created the original site back in 2004, and then he and his brother (& my housemate) steve worked together to update it in around 2007.

i had the idea of the dollhouse rooms, and thom ran with it and made it perfect.

he also had the idea, when we re-launched the site, to add this crazy peek-a-boo flash intro, which contains a silly little clip of me and brian (yes, that’s brian’s bum…yes, it was brian’s idea to moon the camera): http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/RESIZED-PastedGraphic-55-410x259.png

anyway……you can go play with it at http://dresdendolls.com/…. it’s all still there: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/RESIZED-PastedGraphic-44.png

we still don’t know how thom died. he was found at home.

like becca, maybe it doesn’t matter.

he hasn’t had the easiest road in life, that’s for sure. battles with his brilliant psyche, battles with alcohol, battles with his own hilarious, sardonic self.

i was just scrolling through thom’s Facebook and this was one of his last posts:

“Now that I live down the street from Planned Parenthood and walk by every day, I always try to think of a new and clever thing to say to the bad people protesting outside as I pass. I’m starting to run out of material, I’m by there so much. Ideas?”

….that’s my boy.

i got the news on friday morning, in new york city, just waking up to a new dawn, a new day, a new life having finished up the surprise statue project.

cosmically, i was with david franklin, who used to live at pan 9 and now lives in prague. it was almost uncanny that we were together when i got the text.

last night we had a gathering at the cloud club for steve, his other brother, chris, his parents, the posse.

i’d fallen out of touch with thom, as with a lot of people from the old boston scene, when i started traveling full-time. and mostly only heard about how he was doing when i’d come back home and arch up with steve.

thom’s moved to the west coast.

thom got married and it didn’t last.

thom’s in rehab.

thom was in a motorcycle crash.

thom’s living in salem with some girl.

now there’s a thom-shaped hole.

steve has lost his brother, the way i lost karl, except steve and thom were so, so much closer. they were inseparable, to the point where “the martin brothers” was a common phrase around our house.

but you can’t compete or quantify.

death. here we are again.

thom was there, and then he drifted, and then he was just an arm of this giant body we call our community, our weirdo logical family.

every death, every one, leaves some sort of failing phantom limb.

and every time someone dies, i feel like i should have been doing more to help.

death never stops happening. since i’ve gotten pregnant, all these people have gone away. anthony. neil’s friend terry. thom.

a week or so ago, someone told me that Noirin Plunkett died. noirin here: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/RESIZED-PastedGraphic-87.png

she was one of the people who gave me a non-interest loan when I put the kickstarter out, in exchange for a charity event, which wound up being a really wonderful night in portland at the Q center for LGBT youth….some of you were even there, i’m sure. that was her. that was noirin.

http://blog.amandapalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/RESIZED-PastedGraphic-1_11.png

we only encountered each other through grateful and planning and thank-you emails, and then at shows, and at the charity event, but her death struck me and stuck.

here was this person, who’d been so incredibly generous to me, whose family i did not know, who I would occasionally banter with on twitter, who, if you read her twitter

feed, was progressive and loving and funny and…if you google her name, there is no news about her death.

when i asked how she died, it was unclear. if anyone knows, please tell me.

and now i wonder how many people have disappeared.

with all these phantom limbs….

all we can do

is keep on walking

keep on waving

with whatever limbs we have left.

i’m due in about a month.

i’ll get four more limbs

to love

or

to lose

but we take what we can get

as we get it.

hold yourself, each other, tightly tonight.

enjoy every sandwich.

we’re here for an eyeblink, folks.

love fiercely.

xxx

a

p.s. for those of you who knew thom, i’ll try keep you updated about where to send condolences, donations when the martin family announces.

for now, just keep them in your thoughts.

goodbye thom….we love you.

so the dad recording is WRAPPED. we're in the mixin' phase, and i thank you all so so so much for making it all possible. i hope you love it. it sounds BEAUTIFUL.

NEXT THING UP....IF YOU ARE ANYWHERE In or near NYC:

i'm doing a kind of goodbye Thing before going off to birth this baby. 

i just sent this to the email list as well but there's more patreon-specific info

this is a slightly weird one, but bear with me….it’ll be worth it, i swear.

without ruining the surprise: i’m going to do a quick PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & CHILDREN’S BOOK DRIVE, 8-month fetus and all,

THIS THURSDAY, AUGUST 20th

in co-operation with the 

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (5th Ave @ 42nd Street)

at 6 pm SHARP!

ADMISSION IS FREE (it’s outside!)

but

PLEASE bring a children’s book (or more than one!) to donate to the NYPL’s early literacy program. the performance is in part a book-drive to get books to kids (and their parents) who don’t have access. please make sure the books are new (they can’t accept used books due to mold, etc).

***FOLLOW THE TWITTER & FACEBOOK FEEDS if IT RAINS! we will need to come up with some alternative space***

........

A study of 3- to 5-year-olds who had been read to at least three times per week found the children were:

• Two times more likely to recognize all letters.

• Two times more likely to have word-sight recognitions

• Two times more likely to understand words in context.

(from United for Libraries: http://www.ala.org/united/products_services/booksforbabies/earlyliteracy)

and....

read more about the NYPL’s early literacy program here: http://nypl.org/abc

also thank you to bryant park for their help with this!

LETS GET THE KIDS SOME FECKING BOOKS!!!

important!!!! at 6 pm, HOLD ONTO YOUR BOOK(S) and await instructions…!! once the Thing starts, it’ll be obvious what to do and what’s happening.

......

this whole project/thing has been built in secret for the past two months and will be filmed by a small camera crew (yay michael pope!) and turned into a FILM CLIP which will, indeed, be released as a PATREON THING to fund the entire project and pay all the artists & artisans who were involved in its creation.

it's my first real risk with the patreon. you guys are gong to be funding something truly odd. we'll see how you feel about it. i'm listening.

........

PLEASE NOTE THE LIBRARY ITSELF CLOSES AT 6 pm so if you were planning on gettin’ out a book, come early! 

more info on the location of the NYPL, directions, etc: http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman

RE: the books! all these books will be hauled to different locations to give to parents who can’t afford books to read to their kids, etc. BRING BOOKS YOU LOVE and would LOVE A CHILD TO READ/HAVE READ TO THEM!!!! the focus is on ages 0-5, but anything K-12 works.

the performance itself is going to be *very* short - like, blink and you’ll miss it! i’d suggest arriving around 5:30 if possible and hanging out on the steps and making friends with fellow freaks. bring things to do....and feel free to use this patreon thread as a way to find each other!!!

i'm in the middle of searching for a good place for an AFTER-PARTY just for patreon folks....i can't imagine there will be more than a few hundred of you/us so i'm seeking a righteous bar we can invade. (i'll post the info here in a patron-only post...if anybody has a good idea for something near the NYPL, hit me.)

love love love,

afp + fetus

hola comrades

sorry to have been incommunicado for a while....the Epic Lyme Disease bout knocked me well on my ass and screwed up my flow, but i'm slowly catching up to reality. i didn't want to announce this project until i actually had a moment to sit down and write and reflect. 

i was also nervous about whether it was going to work, or be good. and....it's working, and it's really, really, REALLY good.

for the last three or four days, i've been camped in upstate new york in a beautiful old converted-church recording studio doing something i've wanted to do for over five years now:

i am making a record with my dad, jack palmer.

we have been talking about doing this since the first time, ages ago, that jack came on stage with me to cover a leonard cohen song in washington DC. it took this long to find the right time. then there were label problems, other records, bends in the road. the time is now. (here's a link of us doing "night comes on", by mr cohen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnqDrmj3SjU&spfreload=10). my dad has been a musician all his life...this guitar he's holding is his 55-year old martin that he's had forever. his booming bass voice is stunning. he sings regularly in various choirs in DC, sometimes at the national cathedral. he's sung at the white house. he's too legit to quit.

this Amanda & Jack Thing is a big collection of *all* cover songs, painstakingly hand-selected by both of us over the course of the last few years, from the very old to the very new....mostly with my dad playing guitar and the two of us singing together. i play some piano. some ukulele. some other oddball instruments and toys. mostly really simple, meaningful songs, songs that meant enough to both of us to make the cut. 

it's helping my heart.

it's being engineered by joe costa, who engineered Who Killed Amanda Palmer down at ben folds' studio in nashville. he is awesome (that's him to the left of my dad in the photo).

so: i have NO IDEA how i'm going to release this sucker...i'm going to come to you guys for that. i could certainly just dump everything free-direct-online as a record, or two EPs, and charge you guys....but the record is sounding bad-ass enough that it might be time to print vinyl, maybe even try to give it a life outside amandaland and get it in stores (whatever's left of them). i don't want to decide until i hear the finished, finished thing and talk to y'all. we're in uncharted release territory. ideas are welcome.

i'll write a longer story when the songs start to come out about what we picked, and why, but i wanted to let you guys know that it's happening. we've been in the studio ten hours a day, CRANKIN. my dad is killing it. he's so so good - and not everybody can handle the pressure of endless studio days. he's a pro.

it feels insanely good to be BACK AT WORK, doing what i'm good at, sitting at pianos and mics and instruments....i haven't been in a proper recording studio for a long stretch of time since "theatre is evil"...and that was what....three years ago? too long. 

the baby kicks all day while i sing. they say the wee ones absorb a lot of sonic information in the air around this time, so i can't think of a better moment in my life to be doing this. it's like pregnancy therapy. not only do i not feel useless (that existential angst is definitely starting to set in) but i feel like i'm killing two birds with one stone. making a record. and providing this child with an excellent, repetitive womb-soundtrack....provided by mum and grand-dad.

but also....i'm feeling the slow-motion reality of having a pregnant body hit me like a daily ton of bricks, and if i'm going to be totally honest.

i'm tired. 

i lie down on the studio floor a lot. my fingers are like swollen sausages that make playing the piano a bit of a bitch.

i have to pee every twenty minutes. 

and i'm feeling the weirdness of being able to now count the number of days until i'm not one people, but sort of two people. i keep looking down in total bafflement that i have a baby inside of my body and it's going to come out, and...be here. in a really permanent way. it's exciting and very frightening. 

they say this is normal.

it's not helping that neil and i still have no idea how to merge our physical lives together and haven't yet decided where to go for the year. our lives worked perfectly when we lived apart and made time to spend together, and then we managed to go into a long holding pattern when anthony was sick, and we got too used to the holding pattern. now we're facing a variety of known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. and answers about how to pen the next chapter for a writer who wants book-writing stability and a musician who needs people and a mix of  (plus a baby on the icing of the trilemma) are not forthcoming. the solution seems to get more elusive by the day. i find myself pinching and zooming on google maps late at night, looking at blue-dotty cities that are in the running, asking "...are YOU my mother? are YOU?""

but for right now...i'm back to the studio. day 4. we're on song #8. three days to go.

and it feels so good to say this again: 

i cannot, cannot, cannot wait to share this beautiful music we are making with you. listening back to takes in the control room, i get the nice shivers.

it feels like a "record" in the literal sense.

a record of right now, now, now.

wish us luck.

love,

AFP.

some of you may have never seen this...i'd forgotten about this and it just came into view on youtube for random reasons.

if you want a few minutes of ridiculous amusement, this was my idea of fun a few summers ago. i was in edinburgh and jogging down this labyrinth-like-tunnel every day and decided that, obviously, the thing to do was to make a "labyrinth" spoof.

so we did. 

we were staying at the wonderful cunningham-siggs household at the time and it was all hands on deck.

it's really awesome and really dumb.

this is the kind of thing i decide to spend my time on even though there is absolutely no good reason to do it and it makes no money.

if you want to see the original clip, it makes it even funnier...there's a rip of the movie up here and the scene we spoof is at 18:00 or so....

https://youtu.be/XxV1dIRlmOU?t=1076

watch out or you'll wind up spending your night re-watching labyrinth.

note neil gaiman in mullet wig @ the end

....and don't encourage me or i'll wind up doing entire film spoofs with my patreon money. like - the whole dark crystal. or... or....it could get ugly

x

a

(public post)

hey guys. 

nothing huge to share, just checking in and here for a ramble...

i finally made a more-or-less full recovery...it's hard to tell when you're preggo and everything feels weird anyway. but i felt good enough to get on a plane to come to california, where i'm attending a geeky conference called foo camp, and thus it was that i finally got to meet matthew inman, a.k.a. the Oatmeal. if you aren't a fan, you should be....go look at his work, which i've admired for years, here: http://theoatmeal.com/comics.

(he also just had THE MOST BACKED KICKSTARTER OF ALL TIME - with over 200k backers -  with his "exploding kittens" project, for people who like kittens, and explosions: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens).

there's been a lot of chatting around foo camp about social media and the future of online communities. i helped guide a fantastic discussion yesterday about death and facebook and the way we deal with "the negative" in an internet world that wants us to be so "positive". i've been staying at zoe keating's place with maria popova (http://www.brainpickings.org/), and we've been having long, sad talks about how disturbing facebook has become. i'm really glad to be driving blog traffic here to patreon....but facebook still has its claws in all of us, and it seems to be getting more and more conniving about what it will and won't deliver. none of us can come up with a solution to the dillema: facebook is where everybody is hanging out, but it's not geared to "help" you, it's geared to make money for facebook.

i may write a longer screed about that at some point. my hands feel painfully tied.

speaking of all that, i came here to foo camp hoping to make headway on my search to find geeky, passionate permanent staff additions to AFP-world, which is something i'm going to be asking you guys for help with (i know i've been saying it for a while, but life keeps getting in the way of me really buckling down and starting the hiring process).  stay tuned as usual.

meanwhile, there are blackberries outside to pick.

my belly is keeping me low to the ground.

yesterday at foo camp (which is like a summer camp that takes over an office building) i found myself in a little room full of people on their macs, and i lay down on my back with my feet up the wall, since they've been so sore and swollen.

one of the programmer guys was like: "ah yes. my wife used to do that when she was pregnant. she called it The Church of the Floor. The Floor is always there for you. The Floor never lets you down. The Floor will hold you in hard times. The Floor will love you unconditionally and forgive you. The Church of the Floor, yes."

Correct. And there I shall worship.

other random?

i'm going to post up an open letter that's important to me tomorrow or tuesday, keep an eye out for that as well....it was something i was just on the brink of posting the day i fled the UK to go be with anthony, and then i just didn't have the brain or heart to do it. but it's important.

x

a

hola comrades!

.....a little follow-up email/blog, because it looks like patreon had a glitch in their system yesterday and while the blog posted up just fine, many (most?) of you seem to have not gotten it *emailed* to you. IF YOU'RE GETTING THIS EMAIL, hooray, and please comment below and wave hi so i know this is working!.

i'm going to re-post yesterday's blog text here, plus some new goodies...including the TEXT of the "behind the trees" dialogue, at the very bottom, since people were asking for it.

and now that we're here: thank you all so much for the beautiful feedback and love about this clip. i'm so happy you dig it.

ALSO....a few fun things happened since posting yesterday:

-the clip was picked up by an animation festival! ( the 16th Annual Animation Show of Shows: http://www.animationshowofshows.com/) 

-maria popova wrote about it on brainpickings.org (and wrote a reallllly beautiful little commentary on it): http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/30/behind-the-trees-neil-gaiman-dream-amanda-palmer/?utm_content=buffer78a5d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

-....and it was just featured as "short pick of the day" on cartoonbrew.org:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cartoon-brew-pick/behind-the-trees-by-amanda-palmer-and-avi-ofer-117024.html

look at us go!

here's yesterday's full blog.

....................

HOLA COMRADES....

(this is a free public post. $3+ patrons will be getting a separate post with their download code for the video: watch for it!)

Oi! okay, i'm back in action….more or less. still a little under the weather, on antibiotics and probiotics and all the biotics but feeling way better. 

thank you all for so much care and kindness and lymey-spiney advice over the past few weeks. i feel really loved. lyme disease is clearly a nasty nasty thing.

so many people with undetected chronic lyme have contacted me, offering to share their wisdom. i’ve been calling it the “silent rock star killer”. i knew about kathleen hanna,

and avril lavigne, but there are OTHERS. i want to start a super-group with all them called SubLyme. our hit will be “what i got”. ask me no further questions about this….

and now we can get back to business 

presenting .....*drum roll*.......

my first ANIMATED THING!!

it's a *weird* one. 

but I'm really really proud of it, and i’ve been working on it in secret for months.

the story goes like this. 

i tend to use the voice memo function of my iphone for all sorts of things - but mostly song ideas that i almost never come back to. i sing melodies or to chatter a lyric to myself, or to dictate a thread of an idea for a talk if i'm driving and can’t jot shit down. and mostly i never go back and listen to any of this shit. mostly it just stayed like so much urban-myth undigested bubble gum in the pit of some digital art-stomach for years and years. 

this is not a habit i picked up once i had a smart phone. i used to just carry on these terrible habits with recording cassette walkmen, then for a terrible span of lost time in the late 1990s and early 2000s with minidisc, DAT, microcassette, and some weird nameless handheld digital voice recorder (I never really did figure out how to use any of them. I always missed my Walkman). the funny thing is, I have all my recorded Walkman tapes really organized. everything after about 1998 is a lost and disorganized mess. there's no central filing system. there's no single hard-drive. there's just shit everywhere - old phones that died or were lost with recordings on them, song ideas I emailed to myself but never really put anywhere, leaving scores of ideas to be post to various laptops and abandoned email systems. it's kind of a tragedy. but like my lost wedding dress and wedding vows (I know, I'm fucking terrible) I figure the passage of time flattens everything out. and maybe all those  songs were no good anyway. we will never know. 

in desperate times back in the late 1990s, if I was somewhere and without a recording device, I discovered the handy-dandy trick of caking my own voicemail and leaving myself song ideas. those were all certainly lost to time, but I was actually more disciplined about retrieving them, because I knew they had a short life. 

but all along I was, unwittingly, exercising whatever odd head-muscle must learn to *not* to feel foolish whilst humming nonsense words and half-baked rhymes in off-key whispers into phones at the the bottom of coat closets at friends parties. 

and nowadays I just use my iphone. 

now….fact: neil gaiman is a total weirdo when he's half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he's been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he's at his best when he's in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he's the strangest sleeper I've ever slept with (let's not get into who I've slept with...different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he's in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he's asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking neil gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake. jekyll and hyde shit. if i ever get around to it, i want to write a neil gaiman instruction manual for whatever wife comes after me in case I die or we get divorced or whatever. i feel like it would make a good read in general. 

to be fair, and in his defense: neil has pointed out that i sometimes talk in my sleep and i say some pretty insane stuff. but I'm never around to hear it, so, you know, i just have to take his word for it. 

(i just texted and asked him to remind me of an example…he wrote back that i said “i want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, don’t let them take the sheep”)

anyway, most of the time when he spouts some really surreal gems i just enjoy the carnival sideshow of Sleeping Neil and go off to sleep myself. but sometimes the shit is so good i write it down, mostly so i can tell him about it in the morning. 

when I found this voice memo, I couldn't even remember where we were when I recorded it...in a hotel somewhere, i think, and I am pretty sure i recorded it in the bathroom so i wouldn't bug neil. maybe i recorded it the following morning. i don't remember. 

all I know is that I was looking for some other recording ages later and I saw this untitled snippet and played it back and thought it was hilarious. 

and then I played it for neil and HE thought it was hilarious. 

i'd been recently watching the "blank on blank” animations (if you don’t know them…they’re amazing. here’s one of my favorites, a janis joplin interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdF4b1_LQnQ) and was really inspired by what these surreal animators were doing with found sound recordings and interviews that were never intended to be animated, and i thought...this would such make a perfect animation.

i was at TED at the time I uncovered it - march of this last spring - and neil and i happened to be having dinner with maria popova (http://www.brainpickings.org/) and a random friend of hers. neil was so chuffed with the recording I'd found on my phone that he pulled out a set of headphones at the restaurant and said "play them the thing! play them the thing!"...and so i did, and i watched maria getting that delighted-yet-profound bulgarian look on her face. i mentioned it would make an amazing animation and it turns out that maria's random friend was logan smalley, who runs TED Ed (http://ed.ted.com/), which is basically an amazing little factory of awesome educational animated clips. he said he'd help me find an animator...and along with fishing around and asking on social media, i landed avi ofer (this was the clip of avi's  that really sold me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMerSm2ToFY). 

you can see all his work here: http://www.aviofer.com/).

(a note here: i made pals with a handful of great animators who we didn’t wind up using…but many of them are excited to do stuff in the future. sooooo…i’m just saying. we could do more animated Things and i’d be happy as a clambake, and we’d get to give work to some super-talented artists).

so there we were. i hired avi, i dumped my basic ideas and vibe out in an email, sent him a bunch of reference clips and animations i liked, and we talked ideas and concepts on the phone and over email for a month or two. then he and his team got to work. they sent along their progress and every clip was like getting a little christmas present in my email, watching it take shape and grow….

I love what we ended up with. I hope you love it too. 

in closing, this is the thing i actually love most about this story:

unlike the songs I've released here so far: this project wouldn't have HAPPENED without the patreon. 

animating is time-consuming, and the artists need to get paid to slave over their hot animating stoves. 

and i know you guys love me and everything, but I also know what the market will bear as far as weird thing-content like this goes: if I simply fronted the money for this and then put it on YouTube with a nice little tip bucket at the bottom, it'd probably never recuperate a tenth of what it cost to make. likewise, if i fronted the money and then put it onsale, as a paywalled film on iTunes or whatever, it would be appreciated by a few hardcore folks….but locked and out of circulation. it couldn't go onto love a happy healthy youtube and vimeo life, where animations belong so that they can be shared. 

i know I'm also taking a risk, doing this one. there may well be people supporting the patreon here who are like THIS IS NOT THE THINGS I WANTED. if that's you, i encourage you to speak up. i am listening. this whole patreon Thing-thing is, as I made clear at the outset, an experiment. 

and for a moment, all you fine Patreon people, give yourselves a pat on the back. your support means that something now exists that never ever would have existed. 

in a way, that's priceless. 

i love you guys. 

xxxx

afp 

p.s. if you're reading this and you're not a patron, I enthusiastically encourage you to join, especially if you’ve managed to read this far in the blog. when you join, these blogs and content will be emailed straight to your inbox, you can join the comments, and you'll be joining a fantastic & supportive community of weirdos. and I'll love you forever for helping me to Make the Things. patreon 

p.p.s. you $3+ folks have a download link coming in a separate blog/email. watch for it. you $10+ patrons have a long overdue webcast coming your way. watch for that, too. patreon 4eva. 

p.p.p.s. i just showed this clip to whitney’s roommate alexei and he alerted me to http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/. oh my god. it’s an epidemic of mild-mannered british men who say weird shit in their sleep! 

......

the dialogue:

who are you, i asked

umm, just some bloke you met, he said

no who are you really, you're not just some block, you're special

no there's million like me, he said, millions

and i said, well, where are they?

and he said
i dunno

and i said: no really, you've been all over the world, if there's millions like you, where are they?

and he said: behind the trees

i said, which trees?

all the trees.

i said, no i don't think so, neil, i think you're unique-

-no they're all behind the trees, they're all waiting to come out

and i said: when are they gonna come out?

when they've decided its okay.

and i said: well if they're all like you, and they're all behind trees, but you've come out of the tree and you're in the middle, what are they doing back there...because then they're not actually like you...

i'm the first, he said.

okay...so you're like a pioneer?

yes, he said, and...any day now they're gonna come out. i think they're a bit scared. they're like...the read-headed lady...we're not quite sure about her.

and i said: it sounds a lot like you.

well of course it does, they're me.

yeah but you came out. they're behind the trees. you're not behind the tree. you're out from behind the tree. i don't get it.....*sigh*....i don't think anything's behind the trees.

xxxx