(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

hey guys....

so the fine folks over at patreon have booted up a podcast, and they've been pairing together different weirdos for different episodes. so this isn't me talking with the amazing neil degrasse tyson himself (astrophysicist, cosmologist, general all-round bad-ass) but we are back to back in the same episode, AND i'd really encourage all y'all patrons to listen to this one (i start in at about the 18 minute mark)....it's about this platform, and you....AND i spill some more damage about the upcoming Things.

i almost canceled doing this yesterday , since i was still pretty much flat on my back, but as you can tell, once you get me on the nerdy topics of life, internet, and people, i kind of don't want to shut up. it healed me. i swear. thanks patreon.

i'm especially proud of my "don't throw the sunset under the bus" ad lib. not bad.

as far as neil degrasse tyson goes, he's another PATREON POWERHOUSE, with his StarTalk radio podcast. it's currently got 254 patrons and is bringin' in about $2k per month. if you're loving the whole patreon thing...i suggest you check him out. he's making big important things that put this bitch to shame:

https://www.patreon.com/startalkradio?ty=c

here's the podcast!:

https://soundcloud.com/patreon/patreon-podcast-011-neil-degrasse-tyson-amanda-palmer

enjoy.

x

x

x

afp

p.s. i'm feeling heaps better. taking all the antiobiotics. drinking all the kefir. thank you all so much for your advices and good words. today i even vacuumed and went to home depot.....

https://instagram.com/p/5ssiaHQWxa/?taken-by=amandapalmer

p.p.s. i've decided i'm in love with bernie sanders.....

https://www.facebook.com/amandapalmer/posts/10153216344863375

p.p.p.s. i'm hoping to have this Surprise Animation Thing out by the end of the month....cross your fingers. i just recording some fun music for it tonight...after taking a long pregnant-lady bath. life is back. 

(public post)

hey slothfaces....

neil and i just left maine and now i'm back in boston, he's in upstate new york catching up on a weeks worth of neil-gaimany-writing-shit he was supposed to be lazily catching up on instead of being bed-side for a convalescent wife.

i'm feeling normal for the first time in about 9 days, and with that, of course, comes the undone laundry of life. when you don't do shit, it don't get done. if anyone out there is waiting for an email from me, i'm sorry. i've been doing almost NO correspondence for the last week and change.

it's been a real season of vulnerability and letting go, that's for sure. i've just been so far from real life between the pregnancy, anthony's death, the funeral, then going straight into the hospital just as i was getting ready to recouperate that i'm like....whatever. bring it on. i'm happy just trying to survive and feel like a day that doesn't bring more catastrophe is a genius day.

being in the hospital for three days was quite a trip, because i'd just been on the other side of the bed, with anthony. it was like i was trading places with him...him on the drip, me on the drip. him unable to get to the bathroom, me unable to get to the bathroom. him drinking water from a cup in a straw, then me. except now i'm fine, and he's gone. 

we're living in a circle. grieving someone so close is so strange. i miss him but i don't miss him being sick and suffering. i called laura last night and his name came up when i punched in her number, from my address book. his name is there, in speed dial, but he's not there to answer. he'll never be there to answer again.

that just seems impossible, and yet so totally real. maybe it's because i had four years to adjust to the possibility. or maybe that's just how dealing with death goes.

that being said, i keep turning to neil and asking him to please not die.

i don't want to deal with death for a little while. i want a break.

i spent a lot of time on my back in bed for the past week reading the news.

i hate guns. i think america has gone crazy. i posted about it on facebook and was amazed to see the conversations that erupted. 

where are we?

https://www.facebook.com/amandapalmer/photos/a.10151728148973375.1073741835.6565888374/10153211434858375/?type=1&theater

speaking of life and death, i went to the midwife today and the baby's happily growing away in there. we'll meet him in 6 weeks. i am starting to enter a state of total disbelief. i keep looking at neil with this dumb look on my face, saying "neil....we're going to have a BABY. a BABY. a REAL BABY." and he looks at me and blinks and sometimes he's very calm and sometimes i freak him right the fuck out, and i can tell from the look in his face that he has no idea what's about to happen, either. we're just like...wait. what? isn't this a thing that other people do? have babies? we're having a BABY? we're having a baby. i'll shut up now. (A BABY).

with all that, i've been working hard to not let my entire artistic life drop down the sewer, and i have three projects in the pipeline i can start telling you about.

this patreon is weird. wonderful, but new, and weird. it doens't follow the rules of "get everyone excited to get ready to take out their wallets" of either the old major-label format OR the DIY format....because you're already here, paid up, and trusting. which is almost overwhelming sometimes, because i'm like...REALLY? all i have to do is deliver the art? i don't have to spend all my energy convincing people to buy it?

in my own paranoid way, though those edges are getting trimmed down, i still feel some fear about whether or not this is going to work as i start releasing things that aren't standard. but i'm not actually that worried. you'll tell me, and we'll be fine.

coming soon....

-an animation i've been working on in the background, that is so weird i'll ruin it if i explain it. that is getting finishing touches now and i'm hoping to release it in july.

-a NEW batch of cover recordings with a very, very special guest. you may be able to guess (it's not edward ka-spel) which i've been working on for a few years. i'll announce as soon as the animation is out the door. i'm going to ask you guys for guidance about how i should release the songs and charge for them. there's lots of ways we can do it.

and

-a TOTALLY BIZZARO public performance-art project that i am secretly working on...kind of a goodbye to everybody. it will take place, if all goes well, in NYC in the afternoon of august 20th, so if you're in/near NYC, save the date. it'll be free to the public, and it's in a very very special location in cental NYC....but we'll have an afterparty somewhere for patreon people....good excuse to gather and kiss me goodbye. a few days after that, neil and i head off a cliff to go have a baby, not to return for a while.

i'll tell you more as time rolls on.

i really love you all a lot.

thank you for being here with me...

xx

a

p.s. photo by neil.

(public post. cross-posted to the amandapalmer.net blog. i'll read comments in both webspaces)

hola comrades….

well, i wish i was writing on a cheerier topic, given that the past month has already been a barrage of posts about death, grief and mortality, but it appears that we’re still in the woods together. this has been one bitch of a summer. 

you may have noticed i’ve been pretty quiet on the tweeting/blogging/facebook front and you may have assumed it was because neil and I went off, as planned, for what was supposed to be a relaxing week of family vacation in maine. well, kinda.

on wednesday night in boston, before leaving for maine the following day, I got a weird feeling in the night, woke up, dragged my pregnant body to the bathroon to pee, felt a chill in my bones even though it was 75 degrees ou t, thought “that’s odd, must be some weirdo pregnant thing” and went back to bed. on thursday neil and i drove up to maine, and on thursday night I had a fever and a chill. neil made sympathetic sounds. on friday, he noticed the back of my arm and noticed that there was a giant bull’s eye-shaped insect-bite. we took a photo and sent it to doctor dan, our wonderful family doctor. doctor dan phoned in some antibiotics and told us to keep him updated.

on friday night, i sweated through the sheets and moaned and groaned with a chill so bad I had to ask neil to wrap my feet, which were like ice blocks, in a hot washcloth. then my icy feet would turn to burning logs, and I had to ask neil to put a cold washcloth on them to cool them down. i was delirious. he fetched all the washcloths. he’s a really, really, really good husband.

we were worried about the baby. i’m seven - almost eight - months pregnant. this was not good. we went to the emergency room on saturday morning. it was a half hour drive to the closest hospital. neil was careful going over the bumps. i oozed and gurgled.

if you ever need to go to a hospital for any reason, i highly recommend mid-coastal maine in the summer. 

it’s beautiful. 

i was admitted and wound up staying for three days and nights in miles memorial hospital, in damariscotta, maine, where a team of wicked lovely maine doctors and nurses and OB-GYNs took over and made me feel really safe. i must add this one detail now, because it was truly the highlight of my three shitty days in there: THEY HAD LOBSTER ROLLS ON THE HOSPITAL MENU ON MONDAY. i ate a lobster roll.

we even got a summer lightening storm, which i watched from a semi-perpendicular position.

despite the meteorological delights and fine cuisine, it was all pretty unpleasant. they gave me two spinal taps (the first was unsuccessful, and I’ll tell you, nothing’s more disheartening than a doctor poking around with a giant needle in your back and telling you it was, no pun intended, pointless) to rule out meningitis, they hooked me up to bags of fluids and antibiotics, they kept a close watch on the baby’s heartbeat, and I lay there, feeling pretty scared and powerless, and not wanting to say anything to the world because I didn’t have it in me.

our cousin judith spent the first night with me, and then she and neil tag-teamed back and forth between being with the family and being by my side while I beat the fever. we got the blood tests back eventually: acute lyme disease. and the best news possible: early stage lyme disease, which means they caught it in time and it hopefully can’t linger, and most importantly, it can’t hurt the baby.

i don’t know what fucking tick ruined my week, but fuck that tick. the tick bite may have happened the day outside near the woods at anthony’s memorial, or i may have been punished for rollicking around on the grass in upstate new york the week before. i’ll never know. i don’t care. i forgive the tick. the ticks are hungry. i am food. we are all one. whatever.

i was really, really, really, REALLY looking forward to opening for morrissey. the gig of a lifetime, basically, and if you know me, you know why.

i got out of the hospital on tuesday, i crossed my fingers, stayed in bed, drank all the fluids, took all the tylenol, wished all the wishes, and hoped that i would recover quickly.

no such luck. it seems it’s not even the lyme disease itself which is holding me back: it’s the fucking spinal tap. 

(insert spinal tap joke HERE)

in the hours after getting the successful tap on sunday, i developed a debilitating headache, which they say is normal, especially for preggo ladies. 

but it doesn’t FEEL normal, it feels like i’ve got the world’s least-deserved hangover. when I lie down, i’m relatively fine.

when i sit up or walk around for longer than about thirty seconds, it feels like I spent the night raging with a half bottle of tequila, plus a few wines, plus jager shots. plus jello shots. plus grain alcohol shots. plus everybody’s cigarettes. plus snorting mystery powders. like, the kind of night where everything blurs and you just start consuming whatever substances happen to float your way.

THAT KIND OF HANGOVER. 

in a nutshell, it’s really painful. and it doesn’t seem to be abating very quickly.

i made the call yesterday. i can’t do the gig. it’d be ridiculous. i can barely get out of bed, i don’t know how i’d get on a plane, and even if neil was a hero and let me sleep prone/supine on his lap the entire trip, i’m literally not sure i’d be able to make it through the show.

i also feel really scared about this poor little kid in my belly. he’s already been through so much. watching his heartbeat waver up and down while i had a fever was frightening. i felt like i was already being a bad mother, and i haven’t given birth yet. the kid’s been infused with more strange emotions and drama in the past few months than any fetus really should have to endure. i should be like, nesting and gardening and knitting and pickling things, whistling cat stevens to myself while i patiently wait for the arrival of my bundle of joy. instead this fetus has been dragged from hospital to deathbed to hospital. he certainly hasn’t gotten the rose-colored version. this is life, kid. people get sick and die. welcome to earth, baby! 

so i am doing the Totally Adult Thing. i’m canceling the morrissey gig, i’m staying in bed, and while i’m pretty fucking sad about it, it’s also a no-brainer.

for any of you who were traveling from afar to see the AFP/morrissey gig…for all of you who have been looking forward to this moment as much as me….i’m so, so sorry.

they can't refund tickets (as i'm the opening act)...i hope all you still go, and i hope the moz blows your heads off with his great mozzy epicness, and i hope you forgive me if this wound up screwing up your life at all.

i’m especially sad you guys won’t get to see the great liv bruce in action, on the drums. he has already flown out to the west coast and was primed for action to take the stage with me. we’ll have to make it up to you, somehow.

i wrote a nice apology letter to morrissey. i feel sad. i hope he isn’t angry. i was looking forward to this so, so much.

and that’s the weather. 

i’m hoping to make a full recovery within the next week…i do have a whole new exciting recording project to announce (and….record) for patreon. 

and i had a special august surprise for the new yorkers. it should be fine. i hope. i don’t like being sick. i hate it.

i love you all so very much. in the midst of all of this, i’m grateful to have all of you, to have neil, to have my family and my team, to be surrounded by concerned and caring people who aren’t amy-winehousing me to death. i’m really lucky, and i know it. 

and i really hope no more morbid dramatic shit happens this summer.

enough, for fuck’s sake….enough.

xx

a

p.s. i am 32 weeks pregnant, and the baby is the size of a “large jicama”. which i had to google. images of jicamas aren’t very inspiring. but according to the same website, he does have fingernails, and toenails. so that’s something.

(public post)

first, press play.

second, i posted this to facebook yesterday:

"life and death, it never stops. my sorrow and love and grief go out to nick cave and his family. with my own son due to appear in a matter of months, I already can't fathom the idea of losing him.

and strangely enough I went down an insomniac Google-hole last night after seeing U2, who were phenomenal. I got to talk with bono for a bit after the show (he made me awww by putting his head on my belly and blessing the baby) and in the midst of a great discussion about the worlds greatest and classiest songwriter/performers (nick cave was name-checked, as was jacques brel) I mentioned i'd just seen the amy winehouse documentary, and bono sighed about the nature of hard-drug-lifestyle glorification cyclically stealing artists' lives like clockwork. he mentioned michael hutchence.

I hadn't thought about michael hutchence, or his suicide, in a while. I was quite an INXS fan in the 90s...along with nick cave...and U2...all such an influence on little songwriting-me.

so it was that I happened to go a-googling at 3 am and found myself reading about the sad sad circumstances and rabbit hole around his suicide (not to mention paula yates' overdose, peaches geldoff's overdose...what a tangle of sadness).

one thing that struck me: nick cave (an aussie) played "into my arms" at hutchence (an aussie)'s funeral and requested that no media record it.

damn. i love nick cave so much.

I hope the world and the media and his friends show him that same kind of grace as he goes what he has to do and takes the time he must take to grieve the unthinkable.

love. 

x"

and something odd happened. there was a thread (that got deleted later, i think, by the original commenter) about how terrible my post was, because i was "in typical amanda palmer fashion, making this death all about me". cue all sorts of nasty arguing and 100+ comments with people yelling at each other about how we can and cannot talk about death, and what i should and shouldn't have said.

that in itself made me sad for all involved, but i also found it really interesting, especially since i've been in a vortex of grief about anthony, and watching all the people around me grieve in their various ways. our own social group of mourners, dealing with our own style.

and of course, when you're dealing with death, and you see another death, you see you.

i have to be honest: when someone dies, sometimes it IS all about you. death turns us inwards. and though you also spend a lot of time feeling pain and anger that the dead aren't there to feel ANYTHING, and you curse their non-existence, and you spend a lot of time looking at the pain of others and feeling their pain reflected in yours....a lot of what happens, especially as i look around my close friends and anthony's family and the way we're all dealing, is that death just becomes one big, giant mirror, reflecting us back at us. 

poetically enough, the top comments of the thread were posted by people mourning their own losses - seeing nick's son reflected and refracted through their own mirror of grief. and this brings us all together; this isn't really narcissism, this isn't really "hijacking" the death of another and making it "about you" - it's seeing that we're all connected, and that empathy comes from our shared experience of pain. it's quite different.

the dead, they're complete now. their lives have come and gone, they're finite (in that old latin sense of "finite", as in "perfect", "completed") they don't have the luxury of self-reflection or narcissism. nick cave's son will always be finished at 15, and anthony will always be done at 65. 

we living, on the other hand, continue to feel all the feels. we continue to question, we continue to connect the dots and to scramble to make sense of why why why and how.

lo and behold i came across a relevant passage in the book i was reading this morning....before i dragged my preggo self out of bed. it's "h is for hawk" by helen macdonald, who i discovered at the hay literary festival. it's a stupendous memoir that connects her grief over her father's death with a book she read as a child to her training of an impossible hawk, like a circle, drawing every metaphor together with incredible writing. super profound but cliche-free. highly recommended.

anyway: she's getting to this point where she feels like she's failing at training this hawk because she's just too miserable as a human being, and the hawk knows what a useless human being she is, and she cannot escape her fate and failure....

...and all of a sudden, after days of failure, she breaks down and tells her friend Stuart that she's been unable to cope with her father's death, and that she's stuck in a depression. later that day, the hawk finally does what she needs to hawk to do, and she's overcome with elation:

....

'You've hit her flying weight', Stuart said approvingly. 'A couple more days of this and we'll get her flying free." Of course he was right. I had miscalculated her flying weight for weeks. But the narcissism of the bereaved is very great. I thought the that the reason the hawk had flown to me was because I had confessed how bad things were. It had made me feel better - and it was this that had made me less offputting to my hawk. I must try to be happier, I told myself. For the hawk's sake I must.

.........

i love that...."The narcissism of the bereaved."

i'm  watching us all go through it, in our own ways....me, paul, michael, nicolas, laura, ron, neil, nivi...everyone he touched....as we hold up the mirror of anthony's death to our own faces to see what we can see, to see what we can make sense of. at least we all know we are not alone in our lostness.

anthony used to say to me that every pitfall, every tragedy, every suffering, every moment of stumbling and pain is also an opportunity for growth, for transformation. 

that's all we can hope for. to transform and not descend.

meanwhile....

neil and i are headed up to maine with friends and family for a week of r&r. 

i'll be online here and there, i need to finally announce my patreon THING plans for the summer, i keep putting it off :) 

x

AFP

p.s. "h is for hawk": http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802123411

http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

hey guys - 

headed down to providence for my last solo show. happy and sad.

in good news, liv-the-drummer KILLED it in bearsville and i'm really really glad he's coming to do the morrissey gig with me so i'm not alone up there. i <3 drummers with unbridled passion.

i know i announced it towards the beginning of the patreon/launch but there's been a few thousand people to join since then, so i'm reaching out again...and asking for input and help.

i built this page "a walk through amandalanda" for when the book came out as a "handy guide for people who don't know dick about my musical/art output" and i think it's a nice starter-kit for the uninitiated.

so, if you haven't enjoyed it, go go go - it's a nice walk through my back catalog and, i think, pretty much gives a good overall starter-point for people who are like "i liked your TED talk - what else have you done?"

but also since you are legion and a better hive mind than my crumbling memory: do you guys have any input about what should be included here?

bear in mind this isn't *supposed* to be a comprehensive discography! so don't make your feedback around "you forgot this song/that song, etc"...it's really more about what YOU as an individual would show some total newcomer to not overwhelm them with content but to draw them in and give them a nice overview of The Best of the Dolls and Amanda.

also: if you have any feedback about the actual WEB LAYOUT, i wanna hear that too.

just, hit me in general. i'm looking to clean and tweak, it's that kinda nesting season.

x

x

x

a