last night, for the first time in my life, i was actually awakened by two (well, i assume it was two) people having sex. sex like you read about, sex like you rent at the porn store: like, serious, SCREAMING, wild, pounding sex. they must have been in the hotel room above me, they must have woken half the hotel or at least everybody in the adjacent rooms, i felt the ceiling shaking. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok and then a rest, and another scream, and then silence, for a moment....then again. but i wasn't upset at all, even though it was about 4:30 am, and i'd had a terrible time trying to get to sleep...this was exciting. i lay there smiling to myself, thinking "I'm in hotel room in berlin listening to people have sex like you rent at the porn store." it made me feel happy, then horribly alone in my empty bed. i've been staying in this hotel room for three days, waiting to leave for home, where i'll only be for four days before turning around and coming right back. this has been the loneliest tour yet, and i've never wanted to be more alone. it's confusing to say the least.
i was seventeen. i was in germany for the first time and had just slammed my hand a good centimeter into a rusty nail, which was jutting out, unseen, from a door in the squat in east berlin where I was staying with jason.
that whole flood of emotions still feels the same, or - at least - I can detect them even though they've been pushed underground and given years of caring, karaoke and karate.
we were convinced that jan was home, since he'd said he would be. so we were knocking hard. It was freezing, winter vacation, just after christmas. the only heat jan had in the squat, next to his towering piles of dubbed cassettes (millions of dead cops, the cramps, sex pistols) was a retro little stove that barely kept the room above see-your-breath level. cold cold cold. he wasn't there. we pounded. then my hand went through the nail. i screamed. was it serious? well, it was bleeding, but not much. it was a hole, a nice little german stigmata. it only took 15 seconds before i didn't know myself whether i was crying to get attention for a wound that wasn't all that bad, actually in pain or shock, or crying about the fact that i was confused about whether i was crying for some real pain or over the confusion my possible ruse. this was a typical pattern in my life. maybe i was homesick. maybe i was just looking for a reason to weep and the nail was just a little gift. we bandaged and disinfected. the incident was easily forgotten. i think jan wasn't there. but he must have come home at some point. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. is there anybody out there?
i walked by that door yesterday. it's 13 years later and jan is still living in the same squat, one floor up. the cassettes are CDs, but most everything else is the same, jan still smiles his shining czech smile, his girlfriend cut up watermelon. we rode around on his motorcycle and watched berlin setting up for the world cup, the russian war memorial, drank come coffee, walked through a church with no insides. there are lots of these in berlin. in my bunk, hiding from the tour and the world outside, i've been watching DVDs of american propaganda films that were shown to soldiers in 1943...right before they were shipped off to die. a series of Seven Informational Films called "Why We Fight". brought to you by the ministry of war, the letter Z and the number 8. this is a jap, this is a german. kill, kill, kill kill kill kill. thwok thwok thwok, watching the bombs drop on every side, watching the bodies fall. hitler at nuremburg. metallica at nuremburg. morrissey at nuremburg. the dresden dolls at nuremburg. that was four days ago. we played right on the rally grounds.
the last three days of the proper tour were those huge festivals. i remember the purgatory-like feeling it had last summer. not many fond memories, mostly images of trailers, where we sat and waited to play, unfriendly people all waiting in the same miserable conditions, pointy shoes, and rain.
one day was good, there was some sun and some air and some shyness that was criminally vulgar....i hiked, with the Dancer, up the huge dutch hill and we looked down on it. there were tens of thousands of people gathered below. tranfixed in the flashing lights and the spectacle of it all. around us, european teenagers were all smoking cigarettes and throwing trash into the tall grass. you just played in front of all of those people, i said. so did you, he said. then we laughed, at the people. at ourselves, at all the trash.
you want your solitude, miss thing? you may just get what you wish for. you may just wake up one day in that twilight zone earth after all the bombs have gone off, surrounded by a pile of books. with no reading glasses.
we joked that it was the only hill in holland. made after the war.
when i was 9, i was at summer camp. not sleep-over camp, but a sort of dregs-of-whoever-was-left day camp at the local rec center. i was one of the richer kids with intellectual parents who simply didn't Believe in overnight camp (the way they didn't Believe in sugar cereal or gel toothpaste or nintendo). when there was a costume contest at the end of the summer, a la halloween, i (of course) threw myself into it full-force. alongside the makeshift draculas, freddy kreugers and michael jacksons, i went as The World. i sported an electric blue leotard and tights and onto my flat-chested, scrawny little body were safety-pinned asia, africa and the rest of continents that my step-sister helped me to cut out from green felt in the kitchen the night before, while my parents probably looked lovingly at their wholesome and intelligent children . but the majority of the contestants, who were mostly boys, went as boxers. not boxers with everlast belts, mouthguards and shiny warm-up capes and fancy boxing shoes. just 10-year old boys who had no costumes. take off the t-shirt, throw it around the neck and when you are asked to parade on front of the costume judges, start punching the air as hard as you can. then you were a boxer. i remember feeling that bizarre combination of feeling costume-proud and insanely jealous of those boxers and their raw power, as i stood there, looking like a spoiled rich art fag in my The World costume. i imagined them at home, eating sugar cereal and playing nintendo til the sun came up, unable to buy materials for any clever costume because their parents were mean and on welfare. but they were punching, punching, swinging with everything they had, putting me to shame.
one morning i woke up to find myself in a city that i had seen before. i hadn't recognized it in the tour book. i was in france, in an Again venue. i wandered up the stairs. ah yes, i remember this. was it a good show here? when was it, a year ago? six months ago? was it a good show? i couldn't tell you, i couldn't tell you if you held a gun to my head. but i remember what amandas remember, and this is what starts to disturb me. and then it hit me that this was happening in every city. was it my mood? was it bad luck? there it is, that's the same yellow backstage couch where i slept when i was ill before the last show here. hey, that's the closet with the electrical supplies where i tried to get some privacy to make a phone call home. that's the airport cafe with the internet. that's the industrial parking lot where i walked in circles for an hour to warm up my voice, and probably where i'll walk in circles tonight. that's where i couldn't find a bathroom in the morning so i had to poop in a plastic bag. that's the dressing room with no door and that's the same potato salad they put out last time. that's the guy i met with the long hair, whats-his-name, who promoted the show. hi. are there any good memories? honestly, they're really few and far between. tour doesn't tend to leave many fond memories. what makes it worth it? the shows should. but i can't remember them. they are mostly the same, even when they're good. it's like taking an amazing shower. do you remember it? even if something remarkable happens, like you have a profound thought, or come up with a wonderful idea? not when you take a shower every day. i doubt it. i don't take a shower every day. i don't want to. mike penta used to say, amanda palmer, amanda palmer is a dirty girl. he started a new toothbrush every two weeks.
when i go back to milan, if we play in the rolling stone again, i'll remember being doubled over with menstrual cramps in the bathroom before the show, not doubled over to really fix anything, because nothing was fixable, and not doubled over for the effect, because nobody was watching. just stuck, knowing full well that the few people outside the door were rolling their eyes at me. uh-oh. amanda's turning into a rock star. here we go. but maybe i was paranoid. it was too late for me to separate the cramps from the confusion. pounding pounding on the door. then i went back into my bunk, and watched The Wall, again, and the maid keeps knocking. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. housekeep-iiing. housekeep-iiing. brian throws his sticks, exits stage. i play another solo song. is there everybody....out there.
that was the day my mother emailed me some old pictures of my cat, govinda, sprawled on the back yard with first litter of kittens. the four of them are flopping all over her and her head is all upside-down with her tongue sticking out a little bit.
there i was, crouching in my pajamas with my eyebrows shaved and bleeding. in an overhead shot, in the the corner of a dank bathroom in a random rock club, clutching my little black book of poetry after the teacher smacked my wrists. smack smack smack. watching my 12-year old self come running at me with a dead rat.
bill asked me why i hadn't blogged in a while, that he felt the hole. i asked for a suggestion. if you can't say something nice, he suggested, don't say anything at all. nail on the head, i said. on the nosey!! so i decided to save it all for one, nice, poetic and painfully long entry. better that way.
it took a while, but it occured to me i wasn't really homesick. i was myself-sick, just sick to death of not being alone, sick to death of not having space to breathe, to make anything. to feel anything other than a kind of numb irritation and simultaneously sick of feeling disconnected, alone, missing my friends, my grounding home and hearth, my piano, the things that make me feel like myself.
this tour, which lasted seven weeks, is over. i'm getting on a plane. but it's not over. it's a four-day break. this was the first tour where, prison-like, i started crossing off days on my tourbook list, ripping out each page as it passed, one day closer to...what? to four days off? whatever i was looking forward to, i'm not getting it. i'm here forever, or at least for anohter five months, which feels close ot forever.
but there were some nice things. there was the scene with the rat. there was the beautiful flower animation. there was the dinner i ate in portugal, treated like a queen, eating real food, cooked by real people. this was good. there was dinner with dahlia the first time round in berlin. she made some broccoli soup, which was wonderful. there was the cafe in fribourg. there were a few other cafes. and there was seeing my family in dublin, for an evening. that was over a month ago. but it left a nice memory. stained, as it was, as it always is, with the soil of sorry-i'm-so-tired. sorry i'm not myself. sorry i'm not available because i'm exhausted and sorry i've been too much of a pussy to organize my life in such a way that i can sit with you without feeling like i'm collapsing into my appetizer, that i can enjoy a conversation with you without losing my voice. different city same story. i've started to sound like a broken record when i run into my old freinds, when it's now going on three visits and two years in a row and it's still: "i'd love to hang out but I'm just too tired...i look unhappy....well, yeah....i've been touring too much....we should take a break....i said that last time?....well, you know, it's hard to find the time to really go home for longer than a week or two...i said that last time? ...oh...i guess i must have...listen, the NEXT time i come to town we'll grab a cup of coffee and i'll....i know....i said that last time....well, what can i say....(insert ironic laugh).....i don't have a real life anymore......" and they let go of my hand and wave good-bye. with pity.
that was supposed to be a positive paragraph, it derailed. just like most days in the past month when i woke up thinking that it wasn't that bad.
i wrote a long blog about two or three weeks ago, when i was really in the thick of it, but i let it be, didn't post it.
now i am looking back over it, cherry-picking the parts that i want to reveal and letting the rest rot in it's stinking heap of negativity.
here are some excerpts:
.......................
excerpt 1
when I first went on tour, it felt a little like a vacation. free from the routines of home which had become too mundane and repetitive, leaving behind the smallness of playing local clubs to convincing a new audience, and the illusion of freedom and the open road. but even then, i went into the process unwilling.
i never wanted to Get Away or Escape From My Life As I Knew It. i walked blindly into it, taking each sacrifice as it came, since it wasn't real life. i assumed that the situation would either improve to the point where it would be enjoyable instead of just tolerated, either that, or it would end.
nowadays i'm softly banging my head against the thin curtain of my tour-bus bunk, not wanting to make any noise because i don't want to wake the ones sleeping.
all the journalists ask me: "aren't you afraid you expose your private life too much?" i find this funny. my family reads this blog, my manager reads it, the label publicist reads it, brian reads it, our crew and promotors read it. this is the fucking ART of telling the truth carefully.
if i actually shared my private life in all it's complexity and detail, i would anger and worry and confuse these people so much....i'd be crucified. so i generally save my personal conflicts, my true heartbreak, for the emails i send to the ones who don't need me as a boss, a rock star, a musician, an idol, a promotional tool or even an artist.
it shouldn't come as a surprise that everything i share here is heavily censored, well, slanted at least..a combination of the reckless impulses to emote and the simultaneous, hyper-conscious measuring of the consequences. i can complain about my own faults, my own mistakes, my own fears, but the line ends there. it's not my place to complain about everybody else's.
...........................
excerpt 2
i am a performer. it's my job to get up on that stage and entertain the crowd, even when i'm sick, even when i'm sick of it, even when i'm ready to keel over in exhaustion. there's something noble about plastering that grimace and/or smile on your face and heaving yourself up there, trying anyway. but for god's sake, i still need to be honest about it. i feel like that's the only saving grace. hello everyone, here are my mistakes. i don't want to be here tonight. we're touring too much and the show is starting to suffer, my voice is starting to sound like it's being ripped apart by the middle of every set. good evening everyone: no illusion for you.
i fuck up on stage, a lot. i never play a song perfectly, and i think that's just fine and dandy. i've played girl anachronism, by my count, over ONE THOUSAND times and i STILL fuck up the lyrics. i can forgive myself everything and anything as long as deep down, i am convinced that i am trying as hard as i possibly can. and i actually like it when things beyond my control take over and force some kind of snafu. i don't invite disaster, but when it comes in the form of a power outage or a blown monitor system or a broken keyboard, i notice how human i become on stage. and i notice, more and more and show by show, that people have not paid their money to sit down and witness perfection. they've come to experience something, feel something, see something real and human. and to err is human. to err while striving for perfection, the small but inevitable glitch of Real Life, is more beautiful than perfection in my book. i believe the japanese have a term for this.
..............................
....and the rest of it was too negative, childish and bitchy.
and i want everyone to love me and think that i am compassionate, wise, kind and clever.
somewhere in the UK, a girl near the front row fainted during "shores of california". she must have been no further than ten feet away from me, and i watched her limp body get passed over the barrier to the security guards. this is where things just seem insane. the human being in me, the woman named amanda, says: "stop. wait, there's someone suffering, do something." the performer smiles and keeps playing, continuing the ruse for the 92% of the audience that has no idea what's going on, in cahoots with the 8% that knows full well that you are deliberately ignoring a fucked-up situation. the solution? none. just mention over the microphone, after the song, how fucked up and inhuman it felt. but when there's no body, when the girl passed out is you, when the girl passed out is the drummer, ah, this is different. then, sometimes, you should downright lie.
or not.
or smile and nod?
or tell the truth?
or dramatize the truth? laugh about it?
when you're playing solo, the choice is yours.
when you're playing with a band, you need to agree to believe in the same decisions.
this will never be easy.
i do have still have fantasies.
i do love touring, and god, do i love playing for people.
when my life isn't ridden with pounds of extra rubbish.
it's sort of like anything you love. something pollutes it, and it really turns on you.
try eating a chocolate cake while listening to babies getting strangled. ruins it.
you want to be able to enjoy your situation, your work. you don't want the noise pollution, the emotional pollution, the baggage and the stress around you. but eveyone, including you, creates it. you're all stuck in a zoo-like environment, and nobody comes to clean up the cage very often. so you adjust. you learn to ignore it, grapple with it, evade it, solve it, eventually....you take it or leave it.
or, someone gives you a Book. you escape. you breathe and find a minute to read Alone even though people are shouting everywhere.
after watching The Wall again Again, i watched the commentary.
roger waters recited the beginning of a poem he had written:
There is a magic in some books
That sucks a man into connections with
The spirits hard to touch
That join him to his kind
A man will seek the reading out
Guarded like a canteen in the desert heat
But sometimes needs must drink
And then the final drop falls sweet
The last page turns
The end
and it goes on, more hopeful, turning the metaphor to his wife, to the book that doesn't end. i have had this Book on tour with me. it's remained unfinished quite on purpose, i was sucked into it and then started to measure Very Carefully how many pages at a sitting. i looked forward to two things for a few weeks. reading the Book, and having a cup of coffee alone in a cafe at the beginning of the day. but it needed to be Away. and sitting down.
a cup of coffee in the venue was worthless, and cup of coffee on the bus was more than worthless. the best cup of coffee was in a good cafe. a bad cafe was better than no cafe. a restaurant was also passable and i did that a few times but it could be unnerving, bothered by waiters. the worst case scenario, but still coffee, was to brew myself a cup of tea on the bus, walk in a straight line away from the Mess and towards Being Alone and sit there, on a stone, on a bench, on a mound of dirt. anything. just give me some solitude, some time to process those thousands of faces, those nasty comments, those conflicting thoughts battling in my already-boiling-over brain. stick me in a room full of people all sitting around, making small talk and sandwiches, staring at the wall, waiting for time to pass, and i will eventually just Go Postal.
there was another book, the one i kept stealing for the camera out of different hotel night tables, dramatically ripping out pages of genesis or whatever. but most of the good footage from prague got lost, and i don't know if it will ever see the light of day. as it poured down rain on the charles bridge, we tried to cover up the camera to get the shots of the book falling, page by page, into the river. under the covered entrance to the brigde were two blind women, street performers. one was playing a synthesizer and both were singing.....ave maria for an unwilling crowd. all trying to escape the downpour, crushed up against them. everyone was forced to listen, barely anyone gave them any money, and the blind woman playing the synthesizer just kept singing, empty eye-sockets rolling heavenward. when the rain lets up, the crowd will thin, and maybe people will listen. i knelt at her side and closed my eyes, all i could see was the heavy coat of the rich italian tourist in from of me. manta tried to get a shot, but the coat. the coat got in the way. a few nights later, a boy from the Brigade named valentin gave me his eye. i thought it was a language barrier issue, when he handed my a small cardboard box at the end of a show in switzerland and said "here's my eye." but no, i opened it up on the bus, and there it was. he was missing an eye, and this was his prosthetic. i put it over my own, stuck a wedge of orange in my mouth and scared the shit out of brian the next morning. when i want to i can make him laugh.
"It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world - billiard balls are most often used for illustration - they don't actually strike each other. 'Rather,' as Timothy Ferris explains, 'the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed." When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.'"
-Bill Bryson (from A Short History of Nearly Everything, aka The Book)
people complain in different ways and at different volumes. smelling the heroin cooking from the next dressing room cubicle, never being able to escape the noise, wading through piles of trash. and i LIVE here, i keep reminding myself. the floor on which i daily tread is sticky from vomit, stained with ashes and i rarely see a dressing room wall without a giant, hairy penis staring me in the face, bidding me a happy welcome. hello, amanda! i wanted to take pictures of every penis in every dressing room i've been in and make a nice little children's book. i wanted to take pictures of every piece of art hanging above every bed in every hotel i've ever stayed in and make a nice little flip-book. i wanted to do a lot of things. sometimes i get a good view of the sky. sometimes there's a hill nearby.
that was the day my mother emailed me some pictures that she had taken that morning of the newly blossomed rhododendron bushes ouside the old house.
after we climbed down from the view, it was dark and the festival was over, placebo had left the stage, we walked onto the space where we had both just played. where the hoards of people had just stood was now just a capret of cups and bottles, the smell of ashes and sweat and french fries and ripped-up dirt. we trudged through it with no snow shoes. wondering, as you do, who is going to pick this up before tomorrow, when it starts all over again? machines? immigrant workers, punching, punching, punching sticks into these cups at a rate of 2000 cups and 6 euros an hour? probably. don't complain you, we say to each other. what's your work day consist of? singing? getting your photo taken with a bunch of fans? sitting and waiting in a bus all day? shut up. just SHUT UP.
i miss myself more than anybody else.
everyday i reach back home, see my apartment, remember my life. when i get enough quiet to myself, the picture becomes clear. i see myself through four lenses, on the television, sitting in the chair in a hotel room, outside in the middle of a huge field in dunkirk, as a couple in the hotel room above me pounds and punches away, having sex like you rent t the porn store. so what was it? did you want to be alone? or have someone here in bed with you?
hand into the nail on the door. thwok. i remember when it seemed like staying in a hotel was a huge luxury. now the fists pound on the door. housekeep-iiing! housekeep-iiing! housekeep-iiing! thwok thwok thwok thwok. cardinal hits his head against the window. housekeep-iiing! stab those plastic cups. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. housekeep-iiing!! thwok thwok thwok! shoot that heroin, my friend in the next dressing room. smack smack smack. there's always somewhere out there a little less well off, isn't there? bombs could be dropping, i could have be ODing, there are much worse things out there than not getting your solitude. solitude is a fucking modern phenomenon, anyway. they didn't use to have it back before the 1500s. it was invented. by da vinci.
my friend reminded me this one: "i complained that i had no shoes, then i saw a man with no feet."
i, unlike a lot of my contemporaries, never actually went through a obsessive full-on pink floyd phase in high school. i've simply gone through a life-long Wall phase. it's not too late, i was discussing with dave. i don't have a bedroom in which to do it anymore, but i do have my bunk. i could download every album, leave them on repeat from my mac and exchange my bunk curtain with a big black-light tapestry of a fractal, put in some spider plants and start taking more drugs. a waft of incense and pot would wave out behind me every time i exited my bunk for the bathroom. i would become comfortably numb, and communicate with nobody (except via my sneakers, which would be covered with meaningful lyrics in sharpie) simply because NOBODY WOULD UNDERSTAND ME. and to a certain extent, i would be right. nobody understands fuck all about anybody else at a certain level. it's just the degree to which we want to be understood that screws some people.
it all became clear to me quickly: i need more time Alone. vast amounts of time Alone, dripping, oozing, mountains of time Alone. enough to fill up a stadium. but i ain't going to get it. i'm lucky if i get 1 or 2 hours a day, and that's not even actual solitude. that's cafe, walking-down-the-street-surrounded-by-voices solitude. from the start of this tour i felt like a polar bear in a zoo-cage. except i made the choice. i want desperately to entertain those people on the other side of the bars. i need them. i was supposed to have a full week off after this tour and i deliberately chose to give it up, to head back to england to do more promotion after being told by Everyone that it was So Important. still, my decision. why am i doing it, when i know it means yet more time in airports, with people, going crazy? i make these decisions in times of stress and accidental high morale, then regret them sorely. i suppose i continue to believe, as all of my rock elders keep telling me, that if i give it all up now, i may be free later. free to tour when i want, free to spend time with my friends and family, free to spend time alone, free to think. free to become myself again. free to write again. but all later. if i think it's worth it. today, i think it is. and it's never all bad. i am juts going to have to learn to be greedier in the correct ways, in the wise and compassionate ways, despite the pain in the ass it causes. there's no other choice.
every band has much the same different same story, every famous singer i meet gives me that knowing You Sucker sympathetic look when you tell them you're been on the road for six weeks and don't have much of a break for the next six months. but they can't do much to help you. they know you Know. they way they Knew. when they were that sucker. that's what the wink they give says. then where you headed? australia? brilliant! then back to the states? then japan? lovely! then europe for another while, good, good, new single coming out. great. this is the push, you know! someday you won't have to be this sucker. they pat you on the arm. but here they are, themselves. some happier, some more trapped, some less, some more free than me, some on the other side already. but we all talk about how we can't complain, because we don't want to, because it's Just Wrong, when there are bands in vans playing to 12 people and children starving in china. and we all sit there, mumbling black ego humor to ourselves, cooking at a slow roast in the dressing room trailer behind the tent, triumphantly safety-pinning another green continent to our electric blue leotards. grinning that toothless grin of empty accomplishment, stealing jealous sideward glances as the boxers around us punch into the air.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Again
I had a dream last night that I was in Chicago, then took a subway to Japan and was suddenly in a tall observation tower in Washington DC. Down below there were giant sights to see, huge statues of liberty, giant pagodas, crumbling buildings...i watched peopl jumping. Upon descending, it was night and I found myself in the cast of extras in an anti-terrorist art-film that involved everyone straddling on free-floating planks in a fake ocean lit from beneath. planes painted white (both inside and out) housed drama between people threatening each other with forks as we all started to freeze (titanic, anyone?). finally we all decided to mutiny and plummet into the ocean because we just couldn't balance anymore and it seemed warmer in the water.
i must be back on tour.
but i'm not. i'm home. for another day, at least. we spent a week on tour came back to boston for a five day break. i call it a cock-tease. hello beautiful apartment and friends. goodbye. the week back on tour, astonishingly, was our first tour back on a bus since October. but we haven't really been home much since october and i find myself really confused by this. where have we been if we haven't been on tour? i had to ask brian. where were we? ah yes, making the record, ah yes, the promo tours, ah yes....but now back to the grind. back on a bus, and this time, for a long time. between now and November we're scheduled to be home no more than about a month in total. oh my god.
i wouldn't say i'm happy about it, but maybe not as sad as i used to be. this last tour felt like a typical example of what life on the road can be like, all the contrast. the first few days were painfully hard and then i had a few sublime moments.
we left for tour a few days after i posted the last entry about ben's death. in the past few weeks, i have watched my entire relationship with the internet evolve in a way i hadn't anticipated. it's never seemed so real.
after i posted that entry, i started to get emails and diary comments from people i had never met that were total strangers, friends of ben, cousins of ben, ex-girlfriends of ben....and they all shared their stories. i had shared mine, and now i got stories back. all of a sudden, i was having conversations with people about grief and life and it all felt totally natural. the point hit particularly close to home when brian and i were somewhere in the midwest (was it kansas city?), crammed into a closet-sized stockroom to do a quick video interview with a local music TV station. tour life. the blur. all the standard questions. when the cameras turned off, the woman who had been interviewing us turned to me and said: "I just wanted to let you know, I read your last blog. It hit really close to home, and I just wanted to thank you." and we hugged each other. and all of a sudden we were human.
i need that humanity so badly. i've started to realize that i rely on this journal and the ongoing conversation as if it were another significant relationship in my life. except this one, i realized in a moment of mortal reflection, can't suddenly up and die on me (unless the internet happens to explode, in which case we'd all be fucked). no, it can only metamorphisize as people come and go, comment or don't, drop in and out. in my nightmares, i imagine myself like that poor has-been actress in "sunset boulevard". i am 65 and aging in a dank room lit only by fringed red lamps with 5-watt light bulbs, typing manically all morning to an online community of non-existent fans about how i could've been a contender. the diary comments, which i will read with wringing hands and shaking false teeth, will all be secretly written by a wretched man-servant who lives in my garage and was once a great Dresden Dolls fan and now has lost his mind and lives in servitude of my Aged Monstrous Ego. he sits patiently with me every night as i pour my pint-sized glass of gin and force him to watch the Paradise DVD for the 23,456th time. "see that!!!" i'll exclaim. "i was HOT back then, you fucker. nobody could touch me!!!" then i will keel over in a drunken haze and he will carry me to my bed, which is shaped like a gigantic swan and there i will lie, backlit and surrounded by fluffy things, until another day comes to torment me. hee.
so all of these emails and comments poured in as we were leaving for/left for tour, and i sat and sifted through them and treated them as my own private funeral and lesson on life and death and how people connect with each other.
but the most beautiful was the photo that jen sent, who read the blog and was reminded that she had taken a picture of me and ben on the day of the aborted-interview meeting.
it was the first night of tour, we were in salt lake city in an airless basement production office, killing time and catching up on email before the show. brian and emily were sitting on either side of me, we were a little army of mac-zombies. i opened the email from jen....and before i even got a chance to see the details i shut my computer and felt like i'd had the wind knocked out of me.
but the worst thing was having nowhere to go. i was surrounded by people and crew and outside was an industrial park and a line of fans. i left the room and left the building. i just started walking, and eventually i came to two buildings off of the highway that were divided by a small, grassy alleyway. the buildings were empty, closed for the day. i sat down on that grass and just bawled, uncontrollably, like a three year old. huge, racking sobs and a throbbing head and spewing phlegm and gutteral moans the likes of which i haven't heard come out of myself since i was in my early twenties. (here's a good time in the sotry to tell you that i posted the photo: it's at www.dresdendolls.com/ben, it's almost religious for christ's sake....like an ominous foreshadowing pieta...). but i knew it wasn't just about ben and the photograph. it was about that, plus everybody dying everywhere else, but mostly it was about being back on the road, away from a lot of my closest friends and feeling totally alone in this environment where i have to just shut myself off and smile all day and act agreeable so i don't rock the very sensitive boat that we are all stuck in together. but then a few miracles happened. as i walked back to the club, pulling myself together, i got a phone call from one of those friends. i poured it all out and talked about how disconnected i felt, how alone and foreign, and he reminded me that you don't go to filene's to buy milk. you can't expect certain things from certain people and situations. and as we were talking, another friend who never calls beeped in from london. he is an accordian player that i've known for years, and he had happened to email me a few hours earlier and knew i was having a rough day. our relationship is a ben-like one. instant connection and not much need for explaining. but very little knowledge of each other. just a caring and an intuition. and the parking lot mud i was standing in as the sky got dark seemed actually comforting. i trudged around in it, getting my shoes all wet as i clung to this little piece of plastic connecting me to people who were thousands of miles away, remembering that they aren't always visible, but they're there. it's like this. it's completely real. it's just not obvious.
the next day was better and i found solace in a cafe in denver (st. marks) all day. i found it by accident and felt like the hand of god had reached down and put it there just for me. there was a woman painting watercolors in the corner, people were talking and reading, the tables were marble-topped, the music was bach cello suites and jimi hendrix and i just melted into a wooden pew for three hours and thought: if i could only find this place in every city, every morning, touring life would be balanced. spending the morning in a best western lobby (which is often the case) is just....fucked.
i find myself wanting badly to return to places i have been. any place. i call it Again. I am becoming a very big fan of Again, but i realize i've actually always been this way. I crave adventure and strange places and surprises to an almost unhealthy degree, but within those surprises i want Again. I want to take a ship to a faraway country, but always sit at the same table in that ship when i drink my morning tea. and when i get to the foreign country, i want to go back to the same park every day and sit under the strange foreign tree and watch it change if it rains. Again Again Again Again Again. Some of the best trips i've taken have been trips BACK to places, when i get to be enveloped not only in the place itself but in my own nostalgia surrounding it. it's like an oreo.
the record is out in three days. it feels like christmas.
now i am going to get capitalistic and remind you to walk into a store and BUY THE FUCKING THING.
i know you've downloaded it, and i am proud of you. now go buy it. buy it the week it comes out, buy 45 copies and give them to your friends and loved ones. it's an amazing piece of packaging and it's an amazing record. end of adverstisement.
hm, and now that i've gone all capitalist on you i feel dirty. i am going to go to bed.
love
a
i must be back on tour.
but i'm not. i'm home. for another day, at least. we spent a week on tour came back to boston for a five day break. i call it a cock-tease. hello beautiful apartment and friends. goodbye. the week back on tour, astonishingly, was our first tour back on a bus since October. but we haven't really been home much since october and i find myself really confused by this. where have we been if we haven't been on tour? i had to ask brian. where were we? ah yes, making the record, ah yes, the promo tours, ah yes....but now back to the grind. back on a bus, and this time, for a long time. between now and November we're scheduled to be home no more than about a month in total. oh my god.
i wouldn't say i'm happy about it, but maybe not as sad as i used to be. this last tour felt like a typical example of what life on the road can be like, all the contrast. the first few days were painfully hard and then i had a few sublime moments.
we left for tour a few days after i posted the last entry about ben's death. in the past few weeks, i have watched my entire relationship with the internet evolve in a way i hadn't anticipated. it's never seemed so real.
after i posted that entry, i started to get emails and diary comments from people i had never met that were total strangers, friends of ben, cousins of ben, ex-girlfriends of ben....and they all shared their stories. i had shared mine, and now i got stories back. all of a sudden, i was having conversations with people about grief and life and it all felt totally natural. the point hit particularly close to home when brian and i were somewhere in the midwest (was it kansas city?), crammed into a closet-sized stockroom to do a quick video interview with a local music TV station. tour life. the blur. all the standard questions. when the cameras turned off, the woman who had been interviewing us turned to me and said: "I just wanted to let you know, I read your last blog. It hit really close to home, and I just wanted to thank you." and we hugged each other. and all of a sudden we were human.
i need that humanity so badly. i've started to realize that i rely on this journal and the ongoing conversation as if it were another significant relationship in my life. except this one, i realized in a moment of mortal reflection, can't suddenly up and die on me (unless the internet happens to explode, in which case we'd all be fucked). no, it can only metamorphisize as people come and go, comment or don't, drop in and out. in my nightmares, i imagine myself like that poor has-been actress in "sunset boulevard". i am 65 and aging in a dank room lit only by fringed red lamps with 5-watt light bulbs, typing manically all morning to an online community of non-existent fans about how i could've been a contender. the diary comments, which i will read with wringing hands and shaking false teeth, will all be secretly written by a wretched man-servant who lives in my garage and was once a great Dresden Dolls fan and now has lost his mind and lives in servitude of my Aged Monstrous Ego. he sits patiently with me every night as i pour my pint-sized glass of gin and force him to watch the Paradise DVD for the 23,456th time. "see that!!!" i'll exclaim. "i was HOT back then, you fucker. nobody could touch me!!!" then i will keel over in a drunken haze and he will carry me to my bed, which is shaped like a gigantic swan and there i will lie, backlit and surrounded by fluffy things, until another day comes to torment me. hee.
so all of these emails and comments poured in as we were leaving for/left for tour, and i sat and sifted through them and treated them as my own private funeral and lesson on life and death and how people connect with each other.
but the most beautiful was the photo that jen sent, who read the blog and was reminded that she had taken a picture of me and ben on the day of the aborted-interview meeting.
it was the first night of tour, we were in salt lake city in an airless basement production office, killing time and catching up on email before the show. brian and emily were sitting on either side of me, we were a little army of mac-zombies. i opened the email from jen....and before i even got a chance to see the details i shut my computer and felt like i'd had the wind knocked out of me.
but the worst thing was having nowhere to go. i was surrounded by people and crew and outside was an industrial park and a line of fans. i left the room and left the building. i just started walking, and eventually i came to two buildings off of the highway that were divided by a small, grassy alleyway. the buildings were empty, closed for the day. i sat down on that grass and just bawled, uncontrollably, like a three year old. huge, racking sobs and a throbbing head and spewing phlegm and gutteral moans the likes of which i haven't heard come out of myself since i was in my early twenties. (here's a good time in the sotry to tell you that i posted the photo: it's at www.dresdendolls.com/ben, it's almost religious for christ's sake....like an ominous foreshadowing pieta...). but i knew it wasn't just about ben and the photograph. it was about that, plus everybody dying everywhere else, but mostly it was about being back on the road, away from a lot of my closest friends and feeling totally alone in this environment where i have to just shut myself off and smile all day and act agreeable so i don't rock the very sensitive boat that we are all stuck in together. but then a few miracles happened. as i walked back to the club, pulling myself together, i got a phone call from one of those friends. i poured it all out and talked about how disconnected i felt, how alone and foreign, and he reminded me that you don't go to filene's to buy milk. you can't expect certain things from certain people and situations. and as we were talking, another friend who never calls beeped in from london. he is an accordian player that i've known for years, and he had happened to email me a few hours earlier and knew i was having a rough day. our relationship is a ben-like one. instant connection and not much need for explaining. but very little knowledge of each other. just a caring and an intuition. and the parking lot mud i was standing in as the sky got dark seemed actually comforting. i trudged around in it, getting my shoes all wet as i clung to this little piece of plastic connecting me to people who were thousands of miles away, remembering that they aren't always visible, but they're there. it's like this. it's completely real. it's just not obvious.
the next day was better and i found solace in a cafe in denver (st. marks) all day. i found it by accident and felt like the hand of god had reached down and put it there just for me. there was a woman painting watercolors in the corner, people were talking and reading, the tables were marble-topped, the music was bach cello suites and jimi hendrix and i just melted into a wooden pew for three hours and thought: if i could only find this place in every city, every morning, touring life would be balanced. spending the morning in a best western lobby (which is often the case) is just....fucked.
i find myself wanting badly to return to places i have been. any place. i call it Again. I am becoming a very big fan of Again, but i realize i've actually always been this way. I crave adventure and strange places and surprises to an almost unhealthy degree, but within those surprises i want Again. I want to take a ship to a faraway country, but always sit at the same table in that ship when i drink my morning tea. and when i get to the foreign country, i want to go back to the same park every day and sit under the strange foreign tree and watch it change if it rains. Again Again Again Again Again. Some of the best trips i've taken have been trips BACK to places, when i get to be enveloped not only in the place itself but in my own nostalgia surrounding it. it's like an oreo.
the record is out in three days. it feels like christmas.
now i am going to get capitalistic and remind you to walk into a store and BUY THE FUCKING THING.
i know you've downloaded it, and i am proud of you. now go buy it. buy it the week it comes out, buy 45 copies and give them to your friends and loved ones. it's an amazing piece of packaging and it's an amazing record. end of adverstisement.
hm, and now that i've gone all capitalist on you i feel dirty. i am going to go to bed.
love
a
Friday, March 31, 2006
ben.
my friend ben chappel died last night. or early this morning, i'm not sure. he was at home in new york. emily called and told me.
a few days ago i read a long feature article in the boston phoenix newspaper about how your myspace page lives on after you're dead, and about how people started using myspace pages as computer-memorials, posting to the dead as if they were living. it struck me as really odd, but obvious. people have to mourn.
so this is my post for ben.
i met ben about a year ago, he was interviewing me for a magazine in new york. he showed up at the restaurant with a girl friend of his and when i asked him how he was, he told me the truth, that he had had a horrible night last night, last night was a reunion with the german girl he had been in obsessive love with for ten years. i guess it didn't go well. so instead of talking about the dresden dolls for his article, he laid his head in my lap and told me about his broken heart. it was the start of something beautiful. after that, we randomly emailed a lot but didn't actually spend any time together until a few months ago, when our e friendship was growing stronger and we kept trying to make plans. we had a way of communicating on email that was totally frank. we would go days or weeks without communicating, then ben would email me from his blackberry and chronicle what he was doing in his life. then i would write back and we would sometimes keep this going for an hour, describing exactly what we were doing and seeing. we never, ever called each other. it seemed wrong to do that.
i loved our correspondence, and i kept all of our emails. i went back and read a lot of them tonight, and it pieces together about anything you'd want to know about either of us. i would email him from a cafe in bordeaux, france, and tell him about my fears of how i would feel when i came home and about the people i had loved and lost in my life and about the waiter and what the wine tasted like and the rain looked like and the air smelled like. he would email back from his friend's house in harlem about how he couldn't sleep and what went through his head all night, about the dirty pane of glass he was seeing, about his aunt, about the shoes he bought. we never pressured each other. often it just felt like we were two alone people reaching out to each other and talking about our alone-ness and enjoying the stories that came with it. i will save all of these these, i will continue to save them the way i save things. this is an excerpt from one of his early emails to me, one that struck me:
.............................................................
+ In fall, with luck, I will be wearing a scarf, stepping out from my
Montreal flat, and heading to some sort of English Lit or what-have-you
class. I hope leaving all the things I've built, but that bring me no
feeling, is the right thing to do. Are people meant to feel passion,
or support themselves, or both? Can you do both? I don't know.
+ I am listening to the new Okkervil River EP that I treated myself to
today. Ultimately, my 16 cds came to over $200. The woman with the
shaved head asked me if I was holiday shopping, and I lied and said
yes. She told me that I get four free sandwiches in the cafe upstairs,
one for each $50 increment I spent.
+ I never graduated college but I sit in an office and I teach
(taught.) a class at Columbia. I wing it all. People are charmed and
easily fooled. People are unaware as to how easy some things are, and
that keeps me in business.
+ I am writing a very long email to you. When people surprise you with
signs and songs, for your birthday, you are offered a lot of liquor. I
apologize for what that yields: a long, rattling, pointless email to a
stranger.
+ I saw your section today, in the record store. There was one CD
left. The Dresden Dolls. I was alone, with headphones on, wandering
the aisles. The music was about New York. I went and bought a New
Yorker book of stories about New York. I imagine sitting on a mountain
in Montreal, bundled up, knowing no one, knowing not where my life is
going to go, reading about the city I'd captured, used up and left.
+ I am making rash decisions in my life, and leaving all I know. I
must weigh the possibility that I am trying to run from myself, who, as
my friends say, will be the same wherever I am. I think I just need
some time off. I think it can be that simple.
+ it's ten past four, and the song said, "we might die from medication,
but we sure killed all the pain." melodrama is appealing, but
overrated. it is also hard to avoid. we are human.
+ i am no longer going to capitalize.
+ i am afraid that if i end this email, i ill be forced to do something
mature and relating to sleep and work and the rest of the elements of a
life i'd never planned on.
i will tell you secrets, and you can feel free to never respond to this
e-mail. i just need to write. you don't need to read it. this is the
only outlet i have that has any intrigue attached to it. i will tell
you things about me, and i will write, also to myself, things about me.
you can, if you feel like reading this, read it in chapters. dickens
published great expectations in pieces. can you imagine it being 1812,
or whenever, and waiting to find out what pip's great expectations
were? can you believe that television has replaced, in cliffhangers
and weekly episodes, the compilation of a novel? what walt whitman did
in the city i'm about to leave, just republishing the same compilation
of poetry over and over, expanded, has been replaced by TV ON DVD
sections at Virgin. The owner of Virgin has his own reality show on
FOX. The owner of FOX is .. well, you know about what he does, I
imagine. you're a well informed woman. Though, I must admit, I almost
did buy Arrested Development on DVD, until I realized I probably
wouldn't watch it more than once.
I changed my mind about the secrets. This e-mail is much too long.
Attached is the sloppy representation of the framed photo you suggested.
ben
.............................................
so a few months ago i went down to new york for some reasons and one was to go on a date with ben. we met in a cafe in the village and we sat and talked for a few minutes. i saw that he had an iPod and headphones and i asked him if he wanted to hear a song from the new record, which we had just finished but not mastered. over guacomole and beer and wine, i popped open my mac on the table and he plugged his headphones in. i played him necessary evil first. while he listened, i typed him a note on a blank screens, telling him that i had tried to keep the song off the record, and he answered via typing back. from that point on, realizing that communicating via typing was far more comfortable for both of us, we conducted the next two and a half hours of our date without speaking. we traded headphones back and forth and typed and ordred beer and wine and more food as the hours wore on. the waitress thought we were crazy. i would play him a track from the record and he would play me a song form his iPod, mostly wilco and the silver jews, and some okkervil river. we would make occasional trips to the bathroom.
then we went home to his apartment, hung out with his two cats, and read in bed together. we just held each other for dear life and fell asleep. we fell in that kind of love that you fall in for a while when you're with someone, barely talking, knowing that you know each other on a level, that you don't need details, that your relationship is just What It Is, that you will hold each other in the night and the morning and then the next night, you will be in different beds in different cities. not asking. not becoming attached, because you can't. because your life isn't built that way. because you scare all your girlfriends away, ben said, because they all say you care more about your cats than you do abou them. because you aren't ever in one place long enough, amanda said, to grow attached enough to a person to really fall in love the way you used to. not that you don't want to. i left ben in the morning and went back in the afternoon. i thought about him. i wondered what would happen if i ever stopped touring. and came to new york, and stayed. would we fall in love? probably. probably not.
then i left. ben ended up helping me shape and edit the introduction text for the sheet music book, because he was brilliant writer. we were about to embark on a project for one of the magazines he writes for to try to conduct an entire weekend of speechless sticky-dating and print the entire date in the magazine. we thought that might work. i went to new york this past weekend and ben called me on saturday and left a message. i got busy and distracted. i didn't call him back and came straight home to boston, emailing when i got back...apologizing. i never heard back.
in memorandum. here is the first, last and only almost-wordless date between amanda and ben chappel, which he asked me to email to him a few weeks later, so it too was saved. i added the "A" and "B" because it wasn't always obvious who was writing. but i left the typos in.
i think ben would approve of my sharing this. people connect in the strangest ways. you don't need to explain, you don't need to worry. you take all the love you can get, how it comes, before it goes away because it does and it will.
.............................................................
Subject: THE DATE
Date: February 6, 2006 10:08:12 PM EST
To: ben@benchappel.net
A: i fought really hard to keep this song off the record
B: why?
A: i dont like it
B: I DO
A: so did everybody else
A: i like this one
B: i remember the first time i heard backstabber at subtonic, afterwards a friend i was with and i were obsessed with it.
BACKSTABBER STAB HER BACK
we still talk about that song!
A: of all the recordings, i think it's one of the two weakest, but its still ok.
B: we also still talk about two headed boy at that show. brilliant
'
A: b side
B: aeroplane one of the best albums of all time
A: agreed
i've been explaining it to older people as the seargent peppers of the nineties
B: and now jeff mangum is on some weird religious crazy solmething or other.
i have this great solo album of his, live at jittery joes, where he plays an amazing version of two headed boy 1 & 2
A: do you think we communicate better through writing?
B: probably, but i communicate better through writing in general.
i can never find the words to say, but my fingers can always find them
more time to process and no worries about getting htem out of your mouth.
thats the weird thing; i never process. i just type type type and it comes out faster than words, and i never re-read
A: im the same way i think it also has to do with things just seeming better thought out when they have time to come out of your fingers than your mouth. except that that sentence didnt really make sense.
B: i got it. my mouth does ok when im comfortable, or drugged.
sad.
A: thats life.
A: thi sis paet of the problem with internet dating and IMing. perhaps people who fall in love over the internet should ease into their relationships by meeting at bars but only typing ewith each other fotr a while
B: and it helps me to have the music
A: yes, i could be in japan right now and the quality of our communication would be about as good.
B: yes. i'm much more epressive through stickies.
A: i have to say though, i really am enjoying the added bonus of eating and dri knig witbh you while we communicate.
there is a hip bandplaying in the bar and i cantg place it but i bet you know it
the candeliers in here are the same as the big one they had at the studio where we made this record
B: not so far from home
A: i'm getting soup
do you want anytjhing?
B: another beer please
A: this is the girl anachronism of the new album
B: though it reminds me more of half jack
A: uhh ohhhhhhh
B: no good good. not the same. great
i want it now
A: greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedy
B: that i certainly am
"god i love communicating"
"i just hate the shit we're missing'
A: this song is about our relationship
B: yeah right
A: close enough
when anybody asks, i'll tell them you'tre mute
B: i may as well be
nevermidn i forget the quote
something like, "better to let people thing you're an idiot than to open your mouth and prove them right"
A: this is true.
you've almost heard the entire record.
B: well if i had one id let you listen to it too.
A: youre a very nice man-boy
B: im working on b eing more the former than latter, but it takes a significant amount of time to figure that bit out.
A: you didnt have
what song are you on?
B: my alcoholic friends
A: this one is good. its about me and brian starting a backalley abortion clinic
i'm going to eat some soup, really excited.
B: no more coat hangers
what kind of soup
A: vegetable blackbean.
you didn't have a strong male rolemodel.
B: i was the male roldmodel. mother's shrink, sister's dad
how much younger was the sistewr?
22 now - 4+ years younger
siblings?
A: i grew up with my stepfather mother and sister, 4 yrs older/ my mom left my dad when i was 1.
my stepdad had two kids, my older stepsister lisa, who was a bookwrom, and karl, who was the coolest older brother type in the world. he painted and played bass and he died when i was 21.
B: how did he die
A: slowly and painfully from lou gehrigs disease
it sucked.
B: a childs death\\shit
makes the parents unable to separate the other from the child sometimes. i can't i
A: my hangover is officially gone
B: but now youre so tired!
i am too.
A: are you going home to bed?
B: i dont think ive gone to bed before 3am or later in at least 10 months
it's inconceivable. more likely home to watch law and order on tivo and do freelance crap. that is, after all, my life.
A: thats heartbreaking.
B: its ok. i have the best 2 cats of all time and i like law and order.
A: its better than navigating real people
B: good pointr. i was going to take the subway home and read until the ambien knocks me out.
i have chronic insomnia and got ambien for it -- i took 20mg and that didnt even put me to sleep. then my shrink decided it was anxiety-based (DUH) and gav eme klonopin. now i have no health insurance, quit all my brain-meds, and need to use a sleep mask to have any chance of falling asleep.
songs over.
A: dp you want one more?
B: absolutel6yv
very possib;ly best track on the record
up in arms
no hitler and no holocaust!
revisionist historian. thats what errol morris' "mr. death," my favorite of his films, is about.
A: it's horrifying.
B: i think of you whenever i watch hedwig
songs over
A: i think if you hear two more youl be complete
B: then dont mess with my itunes
A: im going to silently pause, go piss and come bac k and start again without a vocal word, ok?
B: wilco - smile all the time
is playing
how do you beat loneliness
smile all the time
another song: "the ashtray says, youve been up all night"
another song: "a fake sunset on a television set could upset her, but i never could"
i love that line.
very representative of very many people.
A: true
we were recently doing a theater workshop and the show is about weeping. anyway
one actor told the story of how his brother was at the hospital with the whole family crowded around their very sick cancerous other brother. everyone was weeping, except him. a few days later, he started to weep openly at a tv ad for the united negro college fund and their mother lacerated him
"how can you cry at THIS and not at your dying brother??"
B: when i was 17 my best friend was murdered; i have never cried for him, but he is the hardest lost ive ever experience. earlier this past year another good friend was killed in a car accident and i never cried for him, either, but i did stop going to classes and doing work.
my grandmother's dog is named "paxil"
A: you need to come to the onion cellar. that's where they give you onions and knives instead of drinks and the dresden dolls are playing a 4-week residency next year.
B: theres a silver jews song with a line, lets see if i can remember it now, something like, "i hate when they hang mirrors behind the bar; because i hate to look at myself when i dont know where you are"
A: good.
B: its better written by him -- i cant type. -- he would never use "hate" twice in one line. i just cant remember the first substitute.
another line of his, which inspired my fake band called "all my favorite singers," is "all my favorite singers couldn't sing."
thats how i feel about him. because he can't sing.
A: almost none of my favorite singers can sing.
what song?
B: mandy still
your battery has lucky 13
A: unlucky 12 now
B: 11 is mine.
A: 8 is mine
B: you should put your band name on the mp3 id3 tags
A: these are just home recordings, not mastered...
B: i know but they sound mastered.
i dont know how you managed that, but i cant imagine them sounding better
"she's the kind of girl who looks for love in all the lonely places"
A: hi
B: i love the jeep song
the best line in this song is the same spot second time around..."she's the kind of girl who leaves out condoms on her bedroom dresser/just to make you jealous of the men she fucked before you met her\"
that is so dangerously female
oh im at that line NOW
POW POW POWP OWPOW
POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW
jesus, women, how can you look in the mirror in the morning
A: i'm getting used to it slowly.
B: well. i don't even know what to say about that. i guess you've acquainted (oops) yourself with lucifer, then.
A: are you done?
B: done what?
A: with the song....
B: yes. rice chex now
A: did you hear this one?
B: yes
there won't be any second coming
this is the saddest one
years ago i gave a friend your first album, and she was delighted by my "coin-operated boy dance"
i would move around like a puppet when i was drunk
A: charming.
B: it was.
A: can i come to your apartment adn read while you work? we dont have to make out or anything, i just think it would be nice.
A: yes and you can charge too.B: lets go i want a cigarette
MY APARTMENT IS A FUCKING DISASTER ZONE so, i prepared you.
A: i dont give a shit.
B: me neither
A: i suggest we dont talk but when we get there, i can plug my computer back in and maybe we can type with each other.
B: ill pplug in mine and you can get on my airport and we can just IM on my couch.
A: i dont know how to IM yet
B: well ill teach you. you have 5% left, lets go/
......................................................
goodnight ben.
a few days ago i read a long feature article in the boston phoenix newspaper about how your myspace page lives on after you're dead, and about how people started using myspace pages as computer-memorials, posting to the dead as if they were living. it struck me as really odd, but obvious. people have to mourn.
so this is my post for ben.
i met ben about a year ago, he was interviewing me for a magazine in new york. he showed up at the restaurant with a girl friend of his and when i asked him how he was, he told me the truth, that he had had a horrible night last night, last night was a reunion with the german girl he had been in obsessive love with for ten years. i guess it didn't go well. so instead of talking about the dresden dolls for his article, he laid his head in my lap and told me about his broken heart. it was the start of something beautiful. after that, we randomly emailed a lot but didn't actually spend any time together until a few months ago, when our e friendship was growing stronger and we kept trying to make plans. we had a way of communicating on email that was totally frank. we would go days or weeks without communicating, then ben would email me from his blackberry and chronicle what he was doing in his life. then i would write back and we would sometimes keep this going for an hour, describing exactly what we were doing and seeing. we never, ever called each other. it seemed wrong to do that.
i loved our correspondence, and i kept all of our emails. i went back and read a lot of them tonight, and it pieces together about anything you'd want to know about either of us. i would email him from a cafe in bordeaux, france, and tell him about my fears of how i would feel when i came home and about the people i had loved and lost in my life and about the waiter and what the wine tasted like and the rain looked like and the air smelled like. he would email back from his friend's house in harlem about how he couldn't sleep and what went through his head all night, about the dirty pane of glass he was seeing, about his aunt, about the shoes he bought. we never pressured each other. often it just felt like we were two alone people reaching out to each other and talking about our alone-ness and enjoying the stories that came with it. i will save all of these these, i will continue to save them the way i save things. this is an excerpt from one of his early emails to me, one that struck me:
.............................................................
+ In fall, with luck, I will be wearing a scarf, stepping out from my
Montreal flat, and heading to some sort of English Lit or what-have-you
class. I hope leaving all the things I've built, but that bring me no
feeling, is the right thing to do. Are people meant to feel passion,
or support themselves, or both? Can you do both? I don't know.
+ I am listening to the new Okkervil River EP that I treated myself to
today. Ultimately, my 16 cds came to over $200. The woman with the
shaved head asked me if I was holiday shopping, and I lied and said
yes. She told me that I get four free sandwiches in the cafe upstairs,
one for each $50 increment I spent.
+ I never graduated college but I sit in an office and I teach
(taught.) a class at Columbia. I wing it all. People are charmed and
easily fooled. People are unaware as to how easy some things are, and
that keeps me in business.
+ I am writing a very long email to you. When people surprise you with
signs and songs, for your birthday, you are offered a lot of liquor. I
apologize for what that yields: a long, rattling, pointless email to a
stranger.
+ I saw your section today, in the record store. There was one CD
left. The Dresden Dolls. I was alone, with headphones on, wandering
the aisles. The music was about New York. I went and bought a New
Yorker book of stories about New York. I imagine sitting on a mountain
in Montreal, bundled up, knowing no one, knowing not where my life is
going to go, reading about the city I'd captured, used up and left.
+ I am making rash decisions in my life, and leaving all I know. I
must weigh the possibility that I am trying to run from myself, who, as
my friends say, will be the same wherever I am. I think I just need
some time off. I think it can be that simple.
+ it's ten past four, and the song said, "we might die from medication,
but we sure killed all the pain." melodrama is appealing, but
overrated. it is also hard to avoid. we are human.
+ i am no longer going to capitalize.
+ i am afraid that if i end this email, i ill be forced to do something
mature and relating to sleep and work and the rest of the elements of a
life i'd never planned on.
i will tell you secrets, and you can feel free to never respond to this
e-mail. i just need to write. you don't need to read it. this is the
only outlet i have that has any intrigue attached to it. i will tell
you things about me, and i will write, also to myself, things about me.
you can, if you feel like reading this, read it in chapters. dickens
published great expectations in pieces. can you imagine it being 1812,
or whenever, and waiting to find out what pip's great expectations
were? can you believe that television has replaced, in cliffhangers
and weekly episodes, the compilation of a novel? what walt whitman did
in the city i'm about to leave, just republishing the same compilation
of poetry over and over, expanded, has been replaced by TV ON DVD
sections at Virgin. The owner of Virgin has his own reality show on
FOX. The owner of FOX is .. well, you know about what he does, I
imagine. you're a well informed woman. Though, I must admit, I almost
did buy Arrested Development on DVD, until I realized I probably
wouldn't watch it more than once.
I changed my mind about the secrets. This e-mail is much too long.
Attached is the sloppy representation of the framed photo you suggested.
ben
.............................................
so a few months ago i went down to new york for some reasons and one was to go on a date with ben. we met in a cafe in the village and we sat and talked for a few minutes. i saw that he had an iPod and headphones and i asked him if he wanted to hear a song from the new record, which we had just finished but not mastered. over guacomole and beer and wine, i popped open my mac on the table and he plugged his headphones in. i played him necessary evil first. while he listened, i typed him a note on a blank screens, telling him that i had tried to keep the song off the record, and he answered via typing back. from that point on, realizing that communicating via typing was far more comfortable for both of us, we conducted the next two and a half hours of our date without speaking. we traded headphones back and forth and typed and ordred beer and wine and more food as the hours wore on. the waitress thought we were crazy. i would play him a track from the record and he would play me a song form his iPod, mostly wilco and the silver jews, and some okkervil river. we would make occasional trips to the bathroom.
then we went home to his apartment, hung out with his two cats, and read in bed together. we just held each other for dear life and fell asleep. we fell in that kind of love that you fall in for a while when you're with someone, barely talking, knowing that you know each other on a level, that you don't need details, that your relationship is just What It Is, that you will hold each other in the night and the morning and then the next night, you will be in different beds in different cities. not asking. not becoming attached, because you can't. because your life isn't built that way. because you scare all your girlfriends away, ben said, because they all say you care more about your cats than you do abou them. because you aren't ever in one place long enough, amanda said, to grow attached enough to a person to really fall in love the way you used to. not that you don't want to. i left ben in the morning and went back in the afternoon. i thought about him. i wondered what would happen if i ever stopped touring. and came to new york, and stayed. would we fall in love? probably. probably not.
then i left. ben ended up helping me shape and edit the introduction text for the sheet music book, because he was brilliant writer. we were about to embark on a project for one of the magazines he writes for to try to conduct an entire weekend of speechless sticky-dating and print the entire date in the magazine. we thought that might work. i went to new york this past weekend and ben called me on saturday and left a message. i got busy and distracted. i didn't call him back and came straight home to boston, emailing when i got back...apologizing. i never heard back.
in memorandum. here is the first, last and only almost-wordless date between amanda and ben chappel, which he asked me to email to him a few weeks later, so it too was saved. i added the "A" and "B" because it wasn't always obvious who was writing. but i left the typos in.
i think ben would approve of my sharing this. people connect in the strangest ways. you don't need to explain, you don't need to worry. you take all the love you can get, how it comes, before it goes away because it does and it will.
.............................................................
Subject: THE DATE
Date: February 6, 2006 10:08:12 PM EST
To: ben@benchappel.net
A: i fought really hard to keep this song off the record
B: why?
A: i dont like it
B: I DO
A: so did everybody else
A: i like this one
B: i remember the first time i heard backstabber at subtonic, afterwards a friend i was with and i were obsessed with it.
BACKSTABBER STAB HER BACK
we still talk about that song!
A: of all the recordings, i think it's one of the two weakest, but its still ok.
B: we also still talk about two headed boy at that show. brilliant
'
A: b side
B: aeroplane one of the best albums of all time
A: agreed
i've been explaining it to older people as the seargent peppers of the nineties
B: and now jeff mangum is on some weird religious crazy solmething or other.
i have this great solo album of his, live at jittery joes, where he plays an amazing version of two headed boy 1 & 2
A: do you think we communicate better through writing?
B: probably, but i communicate better through writing in general.
i can never find the words to say, but my fingers can always find them
more time to process and no worries about getting htem out of your mouth.
thats the weird thing; i never process. i just type type type and it comes out faster than words, and i never re-read
A: im the same way i think it also has to do with things just seeming better thought out when they have time to come out of your fingers than your mouth. except that that sentence didnt really make sense.
B: i got it. my mouth does ok when im comfortable, or drugged.
sad.
A: thats life.
A: thi sis paet of the problem with internet dating and IMing. perhaps people who fall in love over the internet should ease into their relationships by meeting at bars but only typing ewith each other fotr a while
B: and it helps me to have the music
A: yes, i could be in japan right now and the quality of our communication would be about as good.
B: yes. i'm much more epressive through stickies.
A: i have to say though, i really am enjoying the added bonus of eating and dri knig witbh you while we communicate.
there is a hip bandplaying in the bar and i cantg place it but i bet you know it
the candeliers in here are the same as the big one they had at the studio where we made this record
B: not so far from home
A: i'm getting soup
do you want anytjhing?
B: another beer please
A: this is the girl anachronism of the new album
B: though it reminds me more of half jack
A: uhh ohhhhhhh
B: no good good. not the same. great
i want it now
A: greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedy
B: that i certainly am
"god i love communicating"
"i just hate the shit we're missing'
A: this song is about our relationship
B: yeah right
A: close enough
when anybody asks, i'll tell them you'tre mute
B: i may as well be
nevermidn i forget the quote
something like, "better to let people thing you're an idiot than to open your mouth and prove them right"
A: this is true.
you've almost heard the entire record.
B: well if i had one id let you listen to it too.
A: youre a very nice man-boy
B: im working on b eing more the former than latter, but it takes a significant amount of time to figure that bit out.
A: you didnt have
what song are you on?
B: my alcoholic friends
A: this one is good. its about me and brian starting a backalley abortion clinic
i'm going to eat some soup, really excited.
B: no more coat hangers
what kind of soup
A: vegetable blackbean.
you didn't have a strong male rolemodel.
B: i was the male roldmodel. mother's shrink, sister's dad
how much younger was the sistewr?
22 now - 4+ years younger
siblings?
A: i grew up with my stepfather mother and sister, 4 yrs older/ my mom left my dad when i was 1.
my stepdad had two kids, my older stepsister lisa, who was a bookwrom, and karl, who was the coolest older brother type in the world. he painted and played bass and he died when i was 21.
B: how did he die
A: slowly and painfully from lou gehrigs disease
it sucked.
B: a childs death\\shit
makes the parents unable to separate the other from the child sometimes. i can't i
A: my hangover is officially gone
B: but now youre so tired!
i am too.
A: are you going home to bed?
B: i dont think ive gone to bed before 3am or later in at least 10 months
it's inconceivable. more likely home to watch law and order on tivo and do freelance crap. that is, after all, my life.
A: thats heartbreaking.
B: its ok. i have the best 2 cats of all time and i like law and order.
A: its better than navigating real people
B: good pointr. i was going to take the subway home and read until the ambien knocks me out.
i have chronic insomnia and got ambien for it -- i took 20mg and that didnt even put me to sleep. then my shrink decided it was anxiety-based (DUH) and gav eme klonopin. now i have no health insurance, quit all my brain-meds, and need to use a sleep mask to have any chance of falling asleep.
songs over.
A: dp you want one more?
B: absolutel6yv
very possib;ly best track on the record
up in arms
no hitler and no holocaust!
revisionist historian. thats what errol morris' "mr. death," my favorite of his films, is about.
A: it's horrifying.
B: i think of you whenever i watch hedwig
songs over
A: i think if you hear two more youl be complete
B: then dont mess with my itunes
A: im going to silently pause, go piss and come bac k and start again without a vocal word, ok?
B: wilco - smile all the time
is playing
how do you beat loneliness
smile all the time
another song: "the ashtray says, youve been up all night"
another song: "a fake sunset on a television set could upset her, but i never could"
i love that line.
very representative of very many people.
A: true
we were recently doing a theater workshop and the show is about weeping. anyway
one actor told the story of how his brother was at the hospital with the whole family crowded around their very sick cancerous other brother. everyone was weeping, except him. a few days later, he started to weep openly at a tv ad for the united negro college fund and their mother lacerated him
"how can you cry at THIS and not at your dying brother??"
B: when i was 17 my best friend was murdered; i have never cried for him, but he is the hardest lost ive ever experience. earlier this past year another good friend was killed in a car accident and i never cried for him, either, but i did stop going to classes and doing work.
my grandmother's dog is named "paxil"
A: you need to come to the onion cellar. that's where they give you onions and knives instead of drinks and the dresden dolls are playing a 4-week residency next year.
B: theres a silver jews song with a line, lets see if i can remember it now, something like, "i hate when they hang mirrors behind the bar; because i hate to look at myself when i dont know where you are"
A: good.
B: its better written by him -- i cant type. -- he would never use "hate" twice in one line. i just cant remember the first substitute.
another line of his, which inspired my fake band called "all my favorite singers," is "all my favorite singers couldn't sing."
thats how i feel about him. because he can't sing.
A: almost none of my favorite singers can sing.
what song?
B: mandy still
your battery has lucky 13
A: unlucky 12 now
B: 11 is mine.
A: 8 is mine
B: you should put your band name on the mp3 id3 tags
A: these are just home recordings, not mastered...
B: i know but they sound mastered.
i dont know how you managed that, but i cant imagine them sounding better
"she's the kind of girl who looks for love in all the lonely places"
A: hi
B: i love the jeep song
the best line in this song is the same spot second time around..."she's the kind of girl who leaves out condoms on her bedroom dresser/just to make you jealous of the men she fucked before you met her\"
that is so dangerously female
oh im at that line NOW
POW POW POWP OWPOW
POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW
jesus, women, how can you look in the mirror in the morning
A: i'm getting used to it slowly.
B: well. i don't even know what to say about that. i guess you've acquainted (oops) yourself with lucifer, then.
A: are you done?
B: done what?
A: with the song....
B: yes. rice chex now
A: did you hear this one?
B: yes
there won't be any second coming
this is the saddest one
years ago i gave a friend your first album, and she was delighted by my "coin-operated boy dance"
i would move around like a puppet when i was drunk
A: charming.
B: it was.
A: can i come to your apartment adn read while you work? we dont have to make out or anything, i just think it would be nice.
A: yes and you can charge too.B: lets go i want a cigarette
MY APARTMENT IS A FUCKING DISASTER ZONE so, i prepared you.
A: i dont give a shit.
B: me neither
A: i suggest we dont talk but when we get there, i can plug my computer back in and maybe we can type with each other.
B: ill pplug in mine and you can get on my airport and we can just IM on my couch.
A: i dont know how to IM yet
B: well ill teach you. you have 5% left, lets go/
......................................................
goodnight ben.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
De-Poisoning
i never post direct follow-up blogs, but in case it just seemed to be necessary.
i came home to boston from texas tonight, went out and drank with my housemates, caem home again, read all of your posts, and turned off my computer.
then i ran a bath.
then i i sang along to/danced in the kitchen to/lip-synched into the bathroom mirror to every single song from the smiths "the queen is dead".
i stopped "mr shankley" and leanred the chords on piano. the bath sat there.
"the boy with the thorn in his side" had particular relevance.
then i took a lukewarm bath and kept listening. fine.
then i turned the computer on and wrote this.
now i'm going to bed.
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out....
love
a
i came home to boston from texas tonight, went out and drank with my housemates, caem home again, read all of your posts, and turned off my computer.
then i ran a bath.
then i i sang along to/danced in the kitchen to/lip-synched into the bathroom mirror to every single song from the smiths "the queen is dead".
i stopped "mr shankley" and leanred the chords on piano. the bath sat there.
"the boy with the thorn in his side" had particular relevance.
then i took a lukewarm bath and kept listening. fine.
then i turned the computer on and wrote this.
now i'm going to bed.
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out
there is a light and it never goes out....
love
a
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Music is Poisoning Me
i used to listen to music all the time.
it was like church.
from the time i was really young, it was sit, sit sit, then later sit and cut and paste and listen listen listen to music and get lost inside of it. worshipping, mindlessly.
what happened?
i think it was a few things.
i have to now point out the irony of the fact that i tried to put on music on my itunes to write this diary entry to and had to turn it off.
i can't handle a soundtrack anymore.
everyone else around me seems totally capable of listening to music while they email, while they work, while they write, talk, live.
i can't do it. actually, who am i kidding. i've never been able to. i couldn't do my homework with music on. i coudln't concentrate.
music was different. music was an activity in itself, unless i was doing something completely visual, like drawing or collaging or making a fanzine or pasting up shapes and glow-in-the-dark-stars on a ladder onto the ceiling in myu bedroom. music was o do physical, listening work to.
i think part of the problem is that i don't do those things anymore. almost all of my work is brain work. that doesn't allow listening. and when i am doing nothing, i want quiet.
i don't listen to much music anymore. i can't really handle it. and it frightens me.
it's an identity crisis of sorts.
i've been at south by southwest for 3 days now.
this is the land of music, of overmusic, uebermusic, of too much sound, of show flyers and business cards and CD demos flying through the air like so much pollen. they all land in the gutter.
you see them there, soaking in the dirty rainwater, but you can't stop to reflect, the crowd pushes you on. noise and more noise drowns out even the good music.
in the last 3 days i have
-played in a rehearsal space with brian for 7 hours
-played a show for about 1000 industry people (it was a good show, a good show yes yes yes)
-laid comatose in the hotel room, shunned housekeeping
-spent 12 hours in the studio recording with ...and you will know us by the trail of dead
-been in countless bars and clubs playing music
and i have been wondering all the while.
music?
what is this shit?
so
i put music on, music people give to me, and i can't hear it anymore. my mind is full of things that aren't music.
but there are So Many Ways of listening. i can't help it. i have always listened to lyrics first. through the years i listen with my business head, my ME head, will this band be a good opener, will this band appeal to other people, will this band XXXXX and all of a sudden i cannot hear anymore. my head is so clouded with judgement that i can't listen. i can;t hear the way i used to.
i used to just listen. and i liked, or i didn't. then all of this happened.
that's why i was so ecstatic when i found regina spektor. sure, i was excited because my brain fired off FRIEND COMRADE WE SHOULD PLAY TOGETHER OOH TELL PEOPLE OOH but fundamentally there was something deeper, something that said: none of that shit matters. i felt the same way when i heard the latest antony & the johnsons, and the trail of dead record that came out last year. just.....Good. good good good. disregard all other voices while listening. but it's getting harder.
i almost never listen to music anymore. i own great headphones. i have a great stereo at home. but i almost never use them. i can't. when i have free time and i am on the internew or emailing, i need silence. when i am at home, i like to listen to my apartment. when i am doing dishes, i turn music on. i have two choices: Friend Rock or Not. Friend Rock is the name i adopted (from ad frank, orginally) for the CDs that friends and fan give me. they accumulate very quickly. when i get home from tour, there are usually dozens. they get given to me on the road. i do not listen as i go along. i can't. i probably, at this time, have over 300 un-listened-to Friend Rock CDs in various piles and Cd wallets at home. I keep up with them, i organize them, but i rarely sit down to listen. when i do, it is a job. sometimes brian joins me. it goes like this:
insert
play first 10 seconds of track one
> if engaging, listen to next 30 seconds
x if not, eject and fling
> if engaging, listen to next minute
-- if not engaging after one minute, skip to next song
x if not engaging after next song, eject and fling
> if engaging after next minute, comptee song and continute listening
> if still engaging, rejoice
this is a VERY basic breakdown. often i will skip through 4 or 5 or 6 songs on a bad CD before flinging.
but a lesson in demo-giving....make sure the first two songs are strong as fuck.
back to my conundrum.
listening to music has become WORK.
i don't want it to be. i listened to music for years because i loved it, not because i wanted anything for or from it, not because i wanted to DO something with it.
though that;s not really true....even in high school i was making music videos in my head to every song on my walkman. but that was outside reality, it doesn't count.
it's all fucking relative.
we played for a huge audience at SxSW, and fucking slayed the show as far as i'm concerned, and the first reviews to come up on the web were terrible. but the show was great. it's starting now....the Great Divide.
i can tell now, there are going to be people out there that just Have to Despise this band. what are they listening for? what do they want? some people freak about us, some people hate it. obvious. but DESPISE US? is it that we're so threatening? why? because we're dong what we want? because we're not directly mimicking bands from 1983? or 1973? or 1993? i dunno. maybe.
but i think Everyone is listening differently nowadays. the Joy Of Music is disappearing rapidly. it's all about other things. things outside. things like credibility, coolness, crowds and t-shirts. when did it happen? this must have been happening in the late seventies when some people were listnening to donna summer and some were listening to the sex pistols and that's how you chose your friends. but was it like THIS? where a band was a compelte advertisement of Who You Are, the way it seems to be with teenagers nowadays? was i in the middle of it and didn't notice? confused. bob lefsetz would have an answer, i am sure (bob: i was born in 1976).
about a month ago i got the new kate bush CD. i am not a fan, i actually just recently discovered her catalog, which i like don't love.
i was curious. she hadn't put out a CD in 12 years. double disc. i heard the about the fourth track (mrs. bartolozzi) on the first disc and i just stopped. i fucking loved it. and i didn't listen to anymore. i just listened to that track. over and over. for five days. i probably put it on 20 times. i couldn't bring myself to listen to the rest of the disc, much less disc two. wrong of me? i don't think so. i was just so excited that i wanted to savor it.
i want music to be like church again.
ach.
conrad from trail of dead fascinates me. he is one of the best songwriters i have ever met and he seems to be totally blase about recording. but then again, he's made more records than i have. will that happen to me? will i disappear into the next room into the clutches of a video game when someone is singing a vocal on my next record? it's totally possible. he's a genius. he can do what he wants, he gets no complaints from me. rock and roll and what it means, all of this shit, is a myth. everyone does what they want to do. always has been. there is no Truth.
recording with them today was mind-blowing. so different from being in the studio with brian. this band pieces songs together. they're almost never in the studio at the same time. i can't fathom that. what can that possibly BE like? we listened to track by track and i laid down piano on a few tracks that weren't finished, taking sveral takes to get everything right. then we did a new song track from scratch (me on piano and conrad on guitar and donald on drums) and then conrad and i laid down some back-up vocals on the one we;d just recorded. and it all seemed....so....simple. when brian and i are in the studio it's like take after take of MUST BE PERFECT madness. and this was just...."oh.........yeah. it's fine". and it was fine. maybe we're too uptight. but then again, it's all relative. i listened to two ofd the finished tracks from the new trail of dead record and that shit is TIGHT. i assume they will take the mess and drivel i recorded and turn it into some kind of sonic masterpiece. donald and i had some art-noise fun doing a nuch of overdubs for a long song in which we put a brick on the sustain pedal of the 9-foot steinway and just made as much noise as possible inside of it using brass knuckles, sticks and guitar picks. conrad and i went out drinking and talked about music and the State of It.
there were moments in that studio earlier tonight where i felt complete, ever more complete than being in the studio making my own recordings. it felt real. making music without thinking too much. conrad and i came back to the studio after drinking at the local (have you ever tried an irish car bomb? - don't) and just played and played on the piano, re-tracing all the songs we'd written back to their stolen sources. his came from a shane macgowan song. mine was stolen from the psychedelic furs. his was stolen from radiohead, which was stolen from a paul mccartney song. indeed, he said, there is nothing new under the sun. we could have played this game for hours.
in other news:
the album is coming out (in the USA, at least) in exactly one month. the tension mounts as the reviews come in black and white from every side. the press in the USA is indifferent, the press in europe and australia are freaking. i am going home for a week or so of family and friends and rest and then we are hitting the road for about ten weeks nonstop. i will be surprised if i have the energy to blog but i might surprise myself as this had become ever more therapeutic. reading all of the comments (yes, i still do, you motherfuckers) is one of the things that keeps my life rolling and helps me not feel alone. i am constantly astounded and ecstatic to find how many intelligent and literate people read this shit and comment on it. i love the internet. i still can't believe it's completely real but i am starting to. every time i get a real, thick book from amazon.com i have more faith.
love
a
it was like church.
from the time i was really young, it was sit, sit sit, then later sit and cut and paste and listen listen listen to music and get lost inside of it. worshipping, mindlessly.
what happened?
i think it was a few things.
i have to now point out the irony of the fact that i tried to put on music on my itunes to write this diary entry to and had to turn it off.
i can't handle a soundtrack anymore.
everyone else around me seems totally capable of listening to music while they email, while they work, while they write, talk, live.
i can't do it. actually, who am i kidding. i've never been able to. i couldn't do my homework with music on. i coudln't concentrate.
music was different. music was an activity in itself, unless i was doing something completely visual, like drawing or collaging or making a fanzine or pasting up shapes and glow-in-the-dark-stars on a ladder onto the ceiling in myu bedroom. music was o do physical, listening work to.
i think part of the problem is that i don't do those things anymore. almost all of my work is brain work. that doesn't allow listening. and when i am doing nothing, i want quiet.
i don't listen to much music anymore. i can't really handle it. and it frightens me.
it's an identity crisis of sorts.
i've been at south by southwest for 3 days now.
this is the land of music, of overmusic, uebermusic, of too much sound, of show flyers and business cards and CD demos flying through the air like so much pollen. they all land in the gutter.
you see them there, soaking in the dirty rainwater, but you can't stop to reflect, the crowd pushes you on. noise and more noise drowns out even the good music.
in the last 3 days i have
-played in a rehearsal space with brian for 7 hours
-played a show for about 1000 industry people (it was a good show, a good show yes yes yes)
-laid comatose in the hotel room, shunned housekeeping
-spent 12 hours in the studio recording with ...and you will know us by the trail of dead
-been in countless bars and clubs playing music
and i have been wondering all the while.
music?
what is this shit?
so
i put music on, music people give to me, and i can't hear it anymore. my mind is full of things that aren't music.
but there are So Many Ways of listening. i can't help it. i have always listened to lyrics first. through the years i listen with my business head, my ME head, will this band be a good opener, will this band appeal to other people, will this band XXXXX and all of a sudden i cannot hear anymore. my head is so clouded with judgement that i can't listen. i can;t hear the way i used to.
i used to just listen. and i liked, or i didn't. then all of this happened.
that's why i was so ecstatic when i found regina spektor. sure, i was excited because my brain fired off FRIEND COMRADE WE SHOULD PLAY TOGETHER OOH TELL PEOPLE OOH but fundamentally there was something deeper, something that said: none of that shit matters. i felt the same way when i heard the latest antony & the johnsons, and the trail of dead record that came out last year. just.....Good. good good good. disregard all other voices while listening. but it's getting harder.
i almost never listen to music anymore. i own great headphones. i have a great stereo at home. but i almost never use them. i can't. when i have free time and i am on the internew or emailing, i need silence. when i am at home, i like to listen to my apartment. when i am doing dishes, i turn music on. i have two choices: Friend Rock or Not. Friend Rock is the name i adopted (from ad frank, orginally) for the CDs that friends and fan give me. they accumulate very quickly. when i get home from tour, there are usually dozens. they get given to me on the road. i do not listen as i go along. i can't. i probably, at this time, have over 300 un-listened-to Friend Rock CDs in various piles and Cd wallets at home. I keep up with them, i organize them, but i rarely sit down to listen. when i do, it is a job. sometimes brian joins me. it goes like this:
insert
play first 10 seconds of track one
> if engaging, listen to next 30 seconds
x if not, eject and fling
> if engaging, listen to next minute
-- if not engaging after one minute, skip to next song
x if not engaging after next song, eject and fling
> if engaging after next minute, comptee song and continute listening
> if still engaging, rejoice
this is a VERY basic breakdown. often i will skip through 4 or 5 or 6 songs on a bad CD before flinging.
but a lesson in demo-giving....make sure the first two songs are strong as fuck.
back to my conundrum.
listening to music has become WORK.
i don't want it to be. i listened to music for years because i loved it, not because i wanted anything for or from it, not because i wanted to DO something with it.
though that;s not really true....even in high school i was making music videos in my head to every song on my walkman. but that was outside reality, it doesn't count.
it's all fucking relative.
we played for a huge audience at SxSW, and fucking slayed the show as far as i'm concerned, and the first reviews to come up on the web were terrible. but the show was great. it's starting now....the Great Divide.
i can tell now, there are going to be people out there that just Have to Despise this band. what are they listening for? what do they want? some people freak about us, some people hate it. obvious. but DESPISE US? is it that we're so threatening? why? because we're dong what we want? because we're not directly mimicking bands from 1983? or 1973? or 1993? i dunno. maybe.
but i think Everyone is listening differently nowadays. the Joy Of Music is disappearing rapidly. it's all about other things. things outside. things like credibility, coolness, crowds and t-shirts. when did it happen? this must have been happening in the late seventies when some people were listnening to donna summer and some were listening to the sex pistols and that's how you chose your friends. but was it like THIS? where a band was a compelte advertisement of Who You Are, the way it seems to be with teenagers nowadays? was i in the middle of it and didn't notice? confused. bob lefsetz would have an answer, i am sure (bob: i was born in 1976).
about a month ago i got the new kate bush CD. i am not a fan, i actually just recently discovered her catalog, which i like don't love.
i was curious. she hadn't put out a CD in 12 years. double disc. i heard the about the fourth track (mrs. bartolozzi) on the first disc and i just stopped. i fucking loved it. and i didn't listen to anymore. i just listened to that track. over and over. for five days. i probably put it on 20 times. i couldn't bring myself to listen to the rest of the disc, much less disc two. wrong of me? i don't think so. i was just so excited that i wanted to savor it.
i want music to be like church again.
ach.
conrad from trail of dead fascinates me. he is one of the best songwriters i have ever met and he seems to be totally blase about recording. but then again, he's made more records than i have. will that happen to me? will i disappear into the next room into the clutches of a video game when someone is singing a vocal on my next record? it's totally possible. he's a genius. he can do what he wants, he gets no complaints from me. rock and roll and what it means, all of this shit, is a myth. everyone does what they want to do. always has been. there is no Truth.
recording with them today was mind-blowing. so different from being in the studio with brian. this band pieces songs together. they're almost never in the studio at the same time. i can't fathom that. what can that possibly BE like? we listened to track by track and i laid down piano on a few tracks that weren't finished, taking sveral takes to get everything right. then we did a new song track from scratch (me on piano and conrad on guitar and donald on drums) and then conrad and i laid down some back-up vocals on the one we;d just recorded. and it all seemed....so....simple. when brian and i are in the studio it's like take after take of MUST BE PERFECT madness. and this was just...."oh.........yeah. it's fine". and it was fine. maybe we're too uptight. but then again, it's all relative. i listened to two ofd the finished tracks from the new trail of dead record and that shit is TIGHT. i assume they will take the mess and drivel i recorded and turn it into some kind of sonic masterpiece. donald and i had some art-noise fun doing a nuch of overdubs for a long song in which we put a brick on the sustain pedal of the 9-foot steinway and just made as much noise as possible inside of it using brass knuckles, sticks and guitar picks. conrad and i went out drinking and talked about music and the State of It.
there were moments in that studio earlier tonight where i felt complete, ever more complete than being in the studio making my own recordings. it felt real. making music without thinking too much. conrad and i came back to the studio after drinking at the local (have you ever tried an irish car bomb? - don't) and just played and played on the piano, re-tracing all the songs we'd written back to their stolen sources. his came from a shane macgowan song. mine was stolen from the psychedelic furs. his was stolen from radiohead, which was stolen from a paul mccartney song. indeed, he said, there is nothing new under the sun. we could have played this game for hours.
in other news:
the album is coming out (in the USA, at least) in exactly one month. the tension mounts as the reviews come in black and white from every side. the press in the USA is indifferent, the press in europe and australia are freaking. i am going home for a week or so of family and friends and rest and then we are hitting the road for about ten weeks nonstop. i will be surprised if i have the energy to blog but i might surprise myself as this had become ever more therapeutic. reading all of the comments (yes, i still do, you motherfuckers) is one of the things that keeps my life rolling and helps me not feel alone. i am constantly astounded and ecstatic to find how many intelligent and literate people read this shit and comment on it. i love the internet. i still can't believe it's completely real but i am starting to. every time i get a real, thick book from amazon.com i have more faith.
love
a
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Blather:Japan.Fans.The White Stripes.PMS.Bad Press.
The nice thing about having a blackberry, besides the fact that I can check email while sitting on the toilet, is that I realized I can directly blog while anywhere and send the text to myself. Since this feels like a candidate for one of the more miserable days of my life, I'm going to keep an ongoing log. While sitting in chairs and in cars. While waiting.
8:00 am boston time - logan airport. in a chair, waiting.
I woke up at six. I was still incredibly tired and the first thing that occurred to me is that I was leaving and I wouldn't sleep in my own bed for a while. So a strange impulse overtook me and I hugged my quilt and pillows goodbye, realizing immediately that it was some bizarre half-asleep lame-ass excuse to stay in bed. We canceled our show in maine last night. Brian wasn't able to play in vermont two night ago, he had a fever of almost 104. He stayed in a hotel bed and I played solo, inviting the audience to sit on the stage and pellet me with requests. I did my best. I was already sick myself at that point and my voice sounded like shit. I forgot the lyrics to "girl anachronism" so invited members of the audience to come up and sing them instead. Charming. I fucking hate that: I hate being able to charm my way out of a sloppy performance. But who cares, it is it is. We drove to new hampshire and both got onstage for a last gasp, canceled the maine show and drove home to collapse. Brian went to the doctor and was diagnosed with strep throat, I'm going to go to the doctor the minute we land in japan. We have almost 20 hours of flying and layovers in front of us. When we land, we're supposed to sleep, wake up, and talk to the press immediately. I'm not sure how this is going to go down now that I've lost my voice and have been communicating to emily and brian via pen and napkin. One thing is certain: if I were talking, I wouldn't have the inclination to be writing this. I talk a lot. It’s too strange to stop. We talk about nothing when we travel, anything. We listen to the sounds of our voices to remain human. Look at that. Remember that. Why is that. Why is there a giant dunkin’ donuts cup in the terminal? Where do they actually manufacture these huge coffee cup sculptures? Your dandruff is growing. I hate The Man. Do people steal salt and pepper shakers from airports. We should email the japanese label rep. When are you knocking yourself out? Is "glorified" always used ironically? I wonder if I'll ever grow to like bloody marys the way I grew to like spinach and broccoli. Ad infinitum....we just talk. We talk to feel not alone. Words make our mouths exercise. We stop listening to each other and we don't even care. It's understood.
9 am - sitting at the gate. in a chair. waiting.
I went through my Logan Airport Hudson News Stand Ritual and bought two bottles of water, The Economist and Teen People. Life is all about balance. We looked for spin magazine, because we know we're in it, but they didn't have it. No early morning narcissism fix for us. The plane is stopping first in chicago, two hour layover, then tokyo. I'm knocking myself out when we get to chicago. I've been reading the early reviews of the record online. Everyone is able to download it, and I ain't gonna blame them. It's the future. I can only remind all of our fans that the artwork packaging is beautiful and the experience is not complete without owning it.
The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and david bowie together?
On a different note, in the wake of last weeks bombing of the iraqi shias' askariya shrine, a wave of sectarian reprisals ensued, mainly against sunni arabs, raising fears that the country might tip into wholesale civil war. Despite a four-day curfew and the deployment of american and iraqi troops, the communal strife continued, leaving at least 500 civilians dead; some morgue officials put the toll at more than 1,300. In addition, our shoot with emma roberts (yep, julia's niece!) was a total lovefest! The star of the new movie "aquamarine" divulged her crush on singer Teddy Geiger and her Juicy Couture obsession ("I'm a walking ad for their stuff!") and raved about Teen People: "I get my copy every month!" Get her glam look with a Michele Busch necklace ($140; michelebusch.com) and Charles Worthington Smart Fixx Curl Enhancing Cream ($7; at Walgreens). President Bush's ratings are at an all time low of 34%. Gloss plus balm in one, soothes lips as it shines. Security issues surrounding the sale of six American Ports to a Dubai-based company. Advanced Any-Angle Self-Tanning Spray. Yes!
-
12:30 - chicago time. in a chair. waiting.
Kate calls it InLove Chicago. Hard to tell from the airport.
--
2 pm - Chicago Time. in a plane chair. waiting, pretty much, to land in tokyo.
In the air after a layover that included bad food and a trip to the bathroom. Emily and I got stared down by our fellow passengers in the gate for spreading out and doing yoga on the floor. Thirteen and a half hours is a shit long time.
I started to get airportitis on the terminal shuttle waiting area. We accidentally developed a new game called "beached". I lay down on the ground and told brian I was a beached manatee. He said that a manatee wouldn't flail its arms out like that, so I scrunched them in. He then listed off names of beached animals (norwall, scallop, lobster) and I would do my best to imitate, writhing on the floor while we waited for the shuttle to terminal 5.. Emily noted that we were freaking out the midwesterners. My voice is coming back, but I can feel my sore throat in my bottom teeth.
-
Some Time - the screen tells me we're over alaska. It’s10:52 tokyo time. chair. sit. wait.
I just watched a movie that seemed like it was made with the intention of ripping me apart. I don't often cry at movies. One scene in "million dollar baby" got me six months ago. But it takes a lot. I cried four separate times just now, breaking my own record by far. The movie was "north country" and I'd never heard of it...just flipped it on. My god. painful sexual harassment scenes, teenage rape and if that wasn't enough, a central character who comes down with Lou Gehrig's disease, which killed my step-brother Karl when I was 21. No wonder I lost it. I think its time to go to sleep, clutch my luckiness like no day in recent history as much as right now, right now, right now.
-
7:30 pm - tokyo time
We're on our way to the hospital so I can ask the doctors if they can help me with my throat. We is me and Koji, our roadrunner label rep. You never know with these guys, but he's cool as shit. He picked us up at the airport and got us to our hotel. Emily is staying behind with brian to poke him with hot tongs so that he doesn't fall asleep and start the evil jetlag cycle. I want to drink some Aquarius and they didn't have it in the vending machine outside the hotel. Aquarius is a lovely cloudy powerade kinda water that tastes like lychees. Its habitforming. There are vending machines EVERYfuckingWHERE in japan. Drive 80 miles to Nowhere, see japanese trees and grass and not a human soul around, but there WILL be a vending machine at the intersection of any two dirt paths. I remember the last time we were here for a few days, my life seemed strung together by moments in which I would dawdle off to find a vending machine that sold Aquarius. We tend to like that which we can understand. Put money in, get drink out. Much less difficult that pointing, gesticulating and bowing like mad for forgiveness of the intrusion. Vending machine could give a shit if you're a whitey or a brother or a martian. Just knows you got the cash.
8:30. Pm- tokyo time. sitting in car. waiting.
The doctor at the hospital said I have a clinging lowgrade flu and an allergy to an unknown substance. maybe I'm allergic to music. He gave me some antibiotics and sent me on my way.
11:30 am - tokyo. on subway. sitting. waiting.
I crashed hard after dinner, woke at 4:30 am, popped half an ambien and crashed til 9. The journalists and crew don't come pounding til noon, so I am soaking up these few moments of freedom, I've been wandering around shibuya all morning, finding a bank and buying haircombs and feeling that dark feeling I feel every time someone walks by me wearing a surgical mask. I would estimate that one in 30 folks here in tokyo sports the surgical mask full time. Its like some strange twilight zone episode if you're not used to it.I wandered into a dept store and checked out the surgical mask display. There are dozens of options.
On an internet note: The band hosts a forum (many of you are probably familiar with it, if not a part of it: www.theshadowbox.net) where people log on and discuss the band, the shows, each other, whatnot. I browse it often and post once in a while but have generally watched it evolve into its own ecosystem, for better or worse. There's a vast assortment of intelligence and pettiness, although the trend seems to be leaning towards the petty as the older fans start getting turned off by the squealines of the newer, younger fans who post thirty times a day and sort of dilute the relevance of topics with inanity. This is just life, so it goes. But last night I saw something that hit a nerve.
Basically, some teenagers sporting mall fashions posted a clip to YouTube of themselves drunkenly singing along to "coin-operated boy"...on a boat. Nothing creative about it, just some drunk Ordinary Fucking People having a gas, but the overall reaction of the forum-dwellers was this high-minded "how dare the/rhese people should die/this makes me want to puke" reaction. I fully understood, there's a part of me that totally related to feeling this about a band. But this was downright unsettling. In response, and I partly blame my cranky jetlag, I posted to the thread and voiced my disgust at the elitism. You can see the whole thread here: http://www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=7892.
And as I sort of expected, some people jumpily apologized, but most were understanding. I reminded them that I have the disadvantage of never being able to discover the band for myself; I'm in it. Music is for Everybody, but I also remember really vividly the protectiveness that I felt about my favorite bands when I was younger, especially when the jocks in my school started listening to the cure. DIE, I thought.
Its such a fine line between being open and honest and being preachy. I never want our audience to feel like there's A WAY to listen to our music. There's millions. Every band who becomes popular has to deal with this. He’s the one. He likes all our pretty songs. And he likes to sing along.
Anyway. All food for thought all the time. I'm glad I at least feel safe and confident enough to have this kind of conversation with our fans, even if its a dicey one. How the fuck else would they be able to trust me, or me them?
March 7
12 noon - tokyo time - sitchairwait
Yesterdays interviews and shoot were simple and went off without a hitch. I was expecting the questions to be more on the typically japanese conservative side and they mostly were save the guy who asked us if we could remember our first orgasm experiences. Brian explained in Long Graphic Detail and I was spared because he took so long. Last night emily, eric (long ago friend and dolls supporter, he used to come to all of our boston shows wearing adam-ant war paint on his cheeks) and I went to the white stripes show in tokyo. We didn't get in touch ahead of time so we got last-minute tickets through Koji but luckily ran into the Stripes' tour manager, who worked for us once in new zealand. This was lucky; we got to watch most of the show from the side of the stage and meet mr jack and ms meg. They reminded me so much of me and brian after a show...tired but gracious, and jack was a total gentleman. We griped about label control and vocal throat sprays with each other and jack showed me his amazing holga camera with multi-colored rotating flash (sort of like those 4-colored clicky pens). meg was also very sweet and relieved to be coming up on the end of a solid year of touring. jack looked nothing like michael Jackson in person. Their show kicked, great energy. And I was pleased to hear them using pre-recorded guitar sampled on one song. Not purists = good.
5 pm tokyo time - sitchairwait
More journalists, more questions, more sticky rice snacks and more walks through the streets of shibuya. One thing I can not get used to over here is the utter lack of male gaze. Emily says she loves it, but she's probably a far greater general victim due to the fact that her tits are twice the size of mine. Italy is pretty bad, there I often feel like a piece of meat walking down the street, winked at, sized up, clucked at and generally drooled over even when I am thoroughly unwashed and look like shit, just because I have a vagina. Here, if a gaze happens to fall on you, it doesn't rest, and it certainly doesn't ever return for a double take. I find it disconcerting. I'm used to the attention. Its like: wait, what the fuck? Why aren't you staring? I washed my hair, I made an effort, asshole! We’re all so conditioned.
-
some night-time on the plane from japan to australia
i take it ALL FUCKING back. north country was obviously not a touching movie, i'm just dealing with early PMS, as proven by the fact that i just cried, TWICE, during a HARRY POTTER movie on the plane. either that or the stress is really getting to me.
This shit is unacceptable.
-
March 15th - Many days later, after Australia, in Austin, TX for south by southwest.
3:37 am. this time i am not waiting. i am alone, in a hotel room. i am avoiding sleep.
my blackberry proved to be a poor up-to-date blogging tool. I wrote up a storm (see above) and then couldn’t send the fucking thing to myself for a week because of technical difficulties. It’s not the future yet. It’s now a week later and I am alone in my texas hotel room, jetlagged and blurry, spent.
We went to Sydney and Melbourne and did press and radio stations and relaxed a little bit before flying here to texas. We played a last-minute gig in Sydney, at a teeny weeny burlesque club, during which I started to botch Girl Anachronism again...but this time no pretty young girls volunteered to do karaoke, so we skipped the tune altogether. People were completely shocked. This was a HUGE single for us in Australia. Eh, I said. We should’ve rehearsed. But when? Where? In the airport? This schedule is shit. We’re not being musicians, we’re being promo whores, it’s not good nor bad, but a whole different frame of mind. Getting up on stage to play all of a sudden feels about as natural as getting ripped out of a hot shower and tossed naked, complete with skis, boots and poles, on top of a black diamond slope. In a different country. Maybe exciting. Ok. Not normal.
I got my period on the plane from Syndey to Los Angeles and beached myself, squishing, in the back row of seats on the plane. Brian and I always joke that all of this touring and travel is terribly unnatural for a menstruating woman, who in the olden days would have been sent away from the tribe to squat quietly over a nice patch of green moss for 3-4 days to bleed and suffer in peace. Nope, stuffed liek a lemming into a long sardine-can with wings bulletting through the sky with 245 other people in my breathing/bleeding space. Very far, very far from the nice patch of green moss. i want my moss. I watched three movies (brokeback mountain, the squid and the whale, walk the line – was not tempted to cry a single time), ate chocolate and decided never to have children.
In more exciting news: we received our first terrible review for the album a few days ago, in venus magazine (I’ll give you the bad highlights):
“...Unfortunately, The Dresden Dolls’ lyrics are still self-absorbed and cynical. Palmer’s lyrical concerns have become a bit cliché and, let’s face it, talking about fucking in pop songs hasn’t been shocking for the past ten years. While the rock production is compelling, one becomes suspicious that it might be masking some weakness in the writing, which becomes particularly evident on the latter half of the album (by the time you reach “Me & The Minibar”, you realize this is the third nearly identical ballad on the CD). This album quickly loses it’s ability to surprise you. Despite the fact that the music, dealing with intimate sexual matters and detailing troubled relationships of all sorts, should be confessional or at least personal, it seems as though the Dresden Dolls hide behind songwriting convention and sonic sheen. This album may leave you wishing the Dolls had traded in their fancy production for a better set of tunes.”
Should I be nick cave and not read the terrible ones? No no no!!! I must. In fact, given the popularity of the Hate Mail section of our website, I think we’ll have to start a Bad Press page. Much more exciting to read than the good press, and more revealing. And now I feel naked: hiding behind songwriting convention has always been my specialty. Next they’re going to do the exposé on our secret writing collaboration with the Matrix and the fact that an aged and greedy Vivienne Westwood actually designed our entire aesthetic from scratch 6 years ago in a secret New York boardroom amongst equally aged and greedy old suits with Punk Cabaret pie charts and stripey cloth swatches. “Let’s start them off in Boston....New York would be a dead giveaway” they whispered. “Nobody will ever suspect!”
Ah, oh well. Hey, ho. Here we go.
Bring it. I’m ready.
love
a
8:00 am boston time - logan airport. in a chair, waiting.
I woke up at six. I was still incredibly tired and the first thing that occurred to me is that I was leaving and I wouldn't sleep in my own bed for a while. So a strange impulse overtook me and I hugged my quilt and pillows goodbye, realizing immediately that it was some bizarre half-asleep lame-ass excuse to stay in bed. We canceled our show in maine last night. Brian wasn't able to play in vermont two night ago, he had a fever of almost 104. He stayed in a hotel bed and I played solo, inviting the audience to sit on the stage and pellet me with requests. I did my best. I was already sick myself at that point and my voice sounded like shit. I forgot the lyrics to "girl anachronism" so invited members of the audience to come up and sing them instead. Charming. I fucking hate that: I hate being able to charm my way out of a sloppy performance. But who cares, it is it is. We drove to new hampshire and both got onstage for a last gasp, canceled the maine show and drove home to collapse. Brian went to the doctor and was diagnosed with strep throat, I'm going to go to the doctor the minute we land in japan. We have almost 20 hours of flying and layovers in front of us. When we land, we're supposed to sleep, wake up, and talk to the press immediately. I'm not sure how this is going to go down now that I've lost my voice and have been communicating to emily and brian via pen and napkin. One thing is certain: if I were talking, I wouldn't have the inclination to be writing this. I talk a lot. It’s too strange to stop. We talk about nothing when we travel, anything. We listen to the sounds of our voices to remain human. Look at that. Remember that. Why is that. Why is there a giant dunkin’ donuts cup in the terminal? Where do they actually manufacture these huge coffee cup sculptures? Your dandruff is growing. I hate The Man. Do people steal salt and pepper shakers from airports. We should email the japanese label rep. When are you knocking yourself out? Is "glorified" always used ironically? I wonder if I'll ever grow to like bloody marys the way I grew to like spinach and broccoli. Ad infinitum....we just talk. We talk to feel not alone. Words make our mouths exercise. We stop listening to each other and we don't even care. It's understood.
9 am - sitting at the gate. in a chair. waiting.
I went through my Logan Airport Hudson News Stand Ritual and bought two bottles of water, The Economist and Teen People. Life is all about balance. We looked for spin magazine, because we know we're in it, but they didn't have it. No early morning narcissism fix for us. The plane is stopping first in chicago, two hour layover, then tokyo. I'm knocking myself out when we get to chicago. I've been reading the early reviews of the record online. Everyone is able to download it, and I ain't gonna blame them. It's the future. I can only remind all of our fans that the artwork packaging is beautiful and the experience is not complete without owning it.
The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and david bowie together?
On a different note, in the wake of last weeks bombing of the iraqi shias' askariya shrine, a wave of sectarian reprisals ensued, mainly against sunni arabs, raising fears that the country might tip into wholesale civil war. Despite a four-day curfew and the deployment of american and iraqi troops, the communal strife continued, leaving at least 500 civilians dead; some morgue officials put the toll at more than 1,300. In addition, our shoot with emma roberts (yep, julia's niece!) was a total lovefest! The star of the new movie "aquamarine" divulged her crush on singer Teddy Geiger and her Juicy Couture obsession ("I'm a walking ad for their stuff!") and raved about Teen People: "I get my copy every month!" Get her glam look with a Michele Busch necklace ($140; michelebusch.com) and Charles Worthington Smart Fixx Curl Enhancing Cream ($7; at Walgreens). President Bush's ratings are at an all time low of 34%. Gloss plus balm in one, soothes lips as it shines. Security issues surrounding the sale of six American Ports to a Dubai-based company. Advanced Any-Angle Self-Tanning Spray. Yes!
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12:30 - chicago time. in a chair. waiting.
Kate calls it InLove Chicago. Hard to tell from the airport.
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2 pm - Chicago Time. in a plane chair. waiting, pretty much, to land in tokyo.
In the air after a layover that included bad food and a trip to the bathroom. Emily and I got stared down by our fellow passengers in the gate for spreading out and doing yoga on the floor. Thirteen and a half hours is a shit long time.
I started to get airportitis on the terminal shuttle waiting area. We accidentally developed a new game called "beached". I lay down on the ground and told brian I was a beached manatee. He said that a manatee wouldn't flail its arms out like that, so I scrunched them in. He then listed off names of beached animals (norwall, scallop, lobster) and I would do my best to imitate, writhing on the floor while we waited for the shuttle to terminal 5.. Emily noted that we were freaking out the midwesterners. My voice is coming back, but I can feel my sore throat in my bottom teeth.
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Some Time - the screen tells me we're over alaska. It’s10:52 tokyo time. chair. sit. wait.
I just watched a movie that seemed like it was made with the intention of ripping me apart. I don't often cry at movies. One scene in "million dollar baby" got me six months ago. But it takes a lot. I cried four separate times just now, breaking my own record by far. The movie was "north country" and I'd never heard of it...just flipped it on. My god. painful sexual harassment scenes, teenage rape and if that wasn't enough, a central character who comes down with Lou Gehrig's disease, which killed my step-brother Karl when I was 21. No wonder I lost it. I think its time to go to sleep, clutch my luckiness like no day in recent history as much as right now, right now, right now.
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7:30 pm - tokyo time
We're on our way to the hospital so I can ask the doctors if they can help me with my throat. We is me and Koji, our roadrunner label rep. You never know with these guys, but he's cool as shit. He picked us up at the airport and got us to our hotel. Emily is staying behind with brian to poke him with hot tongs so that he doesn't fall asleep and start the evil jetlag cycle. I want to drink some Aquarius and they didn't have it in the vending machine outside the hotel. Aquarius is a lovely cloudy powerade kinda water that tastes like lychees. Its habitforming. There are vending machines EVERYfuckingWHERE in japan. Drive 80 miles to Nowhere, see japanese trees and grass and not a human soul around, but there WILL be a vending machine at the intersection of any two dirt paths. I remember the last time we were here for a few days, my life seemed strung together by moments in which I would dawdle off to find a vending machine that sold Aquarius. We tend to like that which we can understand. Put money in, get drink out. Much less difficult that pointing, gesticulating and bowing like mad for forgiveness of the intrusion. Vending machine could give a shit if you're a whitey or a brother or a martian. Just knows you got the cash.
8:30. Pm- tokyo time. sitting in car. waiting.
The doctor at the hospital said I have a clinging lowgrade flu and an allergy to an unknown substance. maybe I'm allergic to music. He gave me some antibiotics and sent me on my way.
11:30 am - tokyo. on subway. sitting. waiting.
I crashed hard after dinner, woke at 4:30 am, popped half an ambien and crashed til 9. The journalists and crew don't come pounding til noon, so I am soaking up these few moments of freedom, I've been wandering around shibuya all morning, finding a bank and buying haircombs and feeling that dark feeling I feel every time someone walks by me wearing a surgical mask. I would estimate that one in 30 folks here in tokyo sports the surgical mask full time. Its like some strange twilight zone episode if you're not used to it.I wandered into a dept store and checked out the surgical mask display. There are dozens of options.
On an internet note: The band hosts a forum (many of you are probably familiar with it, if not a part of it: www.theshadowbox.net) where people log on and discuss the band, the shows, each other, whatnot. I browse it often and post once in a while but have generally watched it evolve into its own ecosystem, for better or worse. There's a vast assortment of intelligence and pettiness, although the trend seems to be leaning towards the petty as the older fans start getting turned off by the squealines of the newer, younger fans who post thirty times a day and sort of dilute the relevance of topics with inanity. This is just life, so it goes. But last night I saw something that hit a nerve.
Basically, some teenagers sporting mall fashions posted a clip to YouTube of themselves drunkenly singing along to "coin-operated boy"...on a boat. Nothing creative about it, just some drunk Ordinary Fucking People having a gas, but the overall reaction of the forum-dwellers was this high-minded "how dare the/rhese people should die/this makes me want to puke" reaction. I fully understood, there's a part of me that totally related to feeling this about a band. But this was downright unsettling. In response, and I partly blame my cranky jetlag, I posted to the thread and voiced my disgust at the elitism. You can see the whole thread here: http://www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=7892.
And as I sort of expected, some people jumpily apologized, but most were understanding. I reminded them that I have the disadvantage of never being able to discover the band for myself; I'm in it. Music is for Everybody, but I also remember really vividly the protectiveness that I felt about my favorite bands when I was younger, especially when the jocks in my school started listening to the cure. DIE, I thought.
Its such a fine line between being open and honest and being preachy. I never want our audience to feel like there's A WAY to listen to our music. There's millions. Every band who becomes popular has to deal with this. He’s the one. He likes all our pretty songs. And he likes to sing along.
Anyway. All food for thought all the time. I'm glad I at least feel safe and confident enough to have this kind of conversation with our fans, even if its a dicey one. How the fuck else would they be able to trust me, or me them?
March 7
12 noon - tokyo time - sitchairwait
Yesterdays interviews and shoot were simple and went off without a hitch. I was expecting the questions to be more on the typically japanese conservative side and they mostly were save the guy who asked us if we could remember our first orgasm experiences. Brian explained in Long Graphic Detail and I was spared because he took so long. Last night emily, eric (long ago friend and dolls supporter, he used to come to all of our boston shows wearing adam-ant war paint on his cheeks) and I went to the white stripes show in tokyo. We didn't get in touch ahead of time so we got last-minute tickets through Koji but luckily ran into the Stripes' tour manager, who worked for us once in new zealand. This was lucky; we got to watch most of the show from the side of the stage and meet mr jack and ms meg. They reminded me so much of me and brian after a show...tired but gracious, and jack was a total gentleman. We griped about label control and vocal throat sprays with each other and jack showed me his amazing holga camera with multi-colored rotating flash (sort of like those 4-colored clicky pens). meg was also very sweet and relieved to be coming up on the end of a solid year of touring. jack looked nothing like michael Jackson in person. Their show kicked, great energy. And I was pleased to hear them using pre-recorded guitar sampled on one song. Not purists = good.
5 pm tokyo time - sitchairwait
More journalists, more questions, more sticky rice snacks and more walks through the streets of shibuya. One thing I can not get used to over here is the utter lack of male gaze. Emily says she loves it, but she's probably a far greater general victim due to the fact that her tits are twice the size of mine. Italy is pretty bad, there I often feel like a piece of meat walking down the street, winked at, sized up, clucked at and generally drooled over even when I am thoroughly unwashed and look like shit, just because I have a vagina. Here, if a gaze happens to fall on you, it doesn't rest, and it certainly doesn't ever return for a double take. I find it disconcerting. I'm used to the attention. Its like: wait, what the fuck? Why aren't you staring? I washed my hair, I made an effort, asshole! We’re all so conditioned.
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some night-time on the plane from japan to australia
i take it ALL FUCKING back. north country was obviously not a touching movie, i'm just dealing with early PMS, as proven by the fact that i just cried, TWICE, during a HARRY POTTER movie on the plane. either that or the stress is really getting to me.
This shit is unacceptable.
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March 15th - Many days later, after Australia, in Austin, TX for south by southwest.
3:37 am. this time i am not waiting. i am alone, in a hotel room. i am avoiding sleep.
my blackberry proved to be a poor up-to-date blogging tool. I wrote up a storm (see above) and then couldn’t send the fucking thing to myself for a week because of technical difficulties. It’s not the future yet. It’s now a week later and I am alone in my texas hotel room, jetlagged and blurry, spent.
We went to Sydney and Melbourne and did press and radio stations and relaxed a little bit before flying here to texas. We played a last-minute gig in Sydney, at a teeny weeny burlesque club, during which I started to botch Girl Anachronism again...but this time no pretty young girls volunteered to do karaoke, so we skipped the tune altogether. People were completely shocked. This was a HUGE single for us in Australia. Eh, I said. We should’ve rehearsed. But when? Where? In the airport? This schedule is shit. We’re not being musicians, we’re being promo whores, it’s not good nor bad, but a whole different frame of mind. Getting up on stage to play all of a sudden feels about as natural as getting ripped out of a hot shower and tossed naked, complete with skis, boots and poles, on top of a black diamond slope. In a different country. Maybe exciting. Ok. Not normal.
I got my period on the plane from Syndey to Los Angeles and beached myself, squishing, in the back row of seats on the plane. Brian and I always joke that all of this touring and travel is terribly unnatural for a menstruating woman, who in the olden days would have been sent away from the tribe to squat quietly over a nice patch of green moss for 3-4 days to bleed and suffer in peace. Nope, stuffed liek a lemming into a long sardine-can with wings bulletting through the sky with 245 other people in my breathing/bleeding space. Very far, very far from the nice patch of green moss. i want my moss. I watched three movies (brokeback mountain, the squid and the whale, walk the line – was not tempted to cry a single time), ate chocolate and decided never to have children.
In more exciting news: we received our first terrible review for the album a few days ago, in venus magazine (I’ll give you the bad highlights):
“...Unfortunately, The Dresden Dolls’ lyrics are still self-absorbed and cynical. Palmer’s lyrical concerns have become a bit cliché and, let’s face it, talking about fucking in pop songs hasn’t been shocking for the past ten years. While the rock production is compelling, one becomes suspicious that it might be masking some weakness in the writing, which becomes particularly evident on the latter half of the album (by the time you reach “Me & The Minibar”, you realize this is the third nearly identical ballad on the CD). This album quickly loses it’s ability to surprise you. Despite the fact that the music, dealing with intimate sexual matters and detailing troubled relationships of all sorts, should be confessional or at least personal, it seems as though the Dresden Dolls hide behind songwriting convention and sonic sheen. This album may leave you wishing the Dolls had traded in their fancy production for a better set of tunes.”
Should I be nick cave and not read the terrible ones? No no no!!! I must. In fact, given the popularity of the Hate Mail section of our website, I think we’ll have to start a Bad Press page. Much more exciting to read than the good press, and more revealing. And now I feel naked: hiding behind songwriting convention has always been my specialty. Next they’re going to do the exposé on our secret writing collaboration with the Matrix and the fact that an aged and greedy Vivienne Westwood actually designed our entire aesthetic from scratch 6 years ago in a secret New York boardroom amongst equally aged and greedy old suits with Punk Cabaret pie charts and stripey cloth swatches. “Let’s start them off in Boston....New York would be a dead giveaway” they whispered. “Nobody will ever suspect!”
Ah, oh well. Hey, ho. Here we go.
Bring it. I’m ready.
love
a
Sunday, February 26, 2006
The Cardinal
I'm in my hotel room, in London, we've been on a press/promo tour for almost two weeks. I am fucking dead. Nobody understands exactly what this is when I tell them, so for the interested, a press tour is this (extracted from our printable schedule):
HOTEL INFO FOR TODAY in MILAN (tomorrow amsterdam, next day london)
Hotel:Una Tocq, Address: Via Tocqueville, Milan Tel: +39 02 6207 1
Check in by: 6:45pm (2 hours ahead is advisable – leave 1 hour minimum
Depart: 8:45pm Milan (MPX), Italy Flight KL163
Arrive:10:35pm Amsterdam, Holland
Hotel Information for tonight: American Hotel Amsterdam :
Leidsekade 97, 1017 PN AmsterdamTel #: +31 (0) 20 556300 www.amsterdamamerican.com
10.00:am check out. Transfer to Universal office for interviews – please have make up done
10.30: MTV.IT interview for MTV web site ( with digital camera) Sara Poma
10.50: PIG monthly alternative trend/culture mag, circ. 50.000: they request 1 casual shot
+quick Q&A on what DD are wearing
press interviews
11.10: RUMORE monthly specialized rock music magazine. Circ. 25.000.
11.30: ROLLING STONE monthly music and trend magazine, circ 50.000
11.50: break
12.05: XL monthly music-trend suppl.to LaRepubblica newspaper,circ.600.000
12.25 KATAWEB leading news portal, interview for their music page
12.45 ROCKOL music news site
1.05pm: lunch break
2.15: press interviews
2.15: ROCKSTAR monthly music magazine, circ. 40.000
2.35: JAM monthly specialized adult rock music mag, circ. 20.000
2.55: VOGUE leading fashion and trend monthly maga,circ. 100.000
3.15: ROCKHARD monthly specialized rock music magazine, circ. 15.000
3.35: ROCKSOUND monthly music mag
3.55: transfer to Radio Popolare, Via Ollearo 5
4.20: RADIO POPOLARE. Taped interview (show: “Patchanka”) for syndacation of
alternative radio stations across the country. To be aired in April
4.50 Transfer to ‘La Bottega Del Forno’ Corso Sempione 82
5.10 refresh make up
5.30 ALL MUSIC:Interview for ‘Extra’, weekly show dedicated to rock and alternative bands.
Dresden Dolls as special guests. 15 mins taped interview (will air in April)
6 00: end of promotion and leave for airport (50 mins drive)
8.45 take off for amsterdam - fly
10.35: Dutch rep. to meet band at airport - Drive to hotel.
Asleep by midnight. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. sometimes play small promo shows in smoky clubs or in fluorescent-lit painfully sterile radio stations.
and how does all this feel?
pros:
1. get to talk about myself, my songwriting, and my most innermost pain all day with foreign journalists who enthusiastically seem to think our new record is the shit
2. hopefully lay groundwork for good record sales in europe
3. meet label and publicist people who work their asses off for us, unseen all day in european offices
cons:
1. not enough sleep
2. no exercise
3. extremely limited access to loved ones, even via telephone
4. terrible food
5. constant back and neck ache from plane, taxi, train and van travel
6. voice loss
7. severe loss of sense of self
8. urge to kill others around self due to overexposure of personalities
9. bad air, bad decor and bad vibes abounding
10. glimpses of cities through bus and plane windows without even getting to take a walk outside the fucking hotel
11. overwhelming feelings of guilt for not enjoying myself when others would kill to be on a trip to promote their own record
12. almost no privacy
13.. italian wirless access (non-existant)
14. clogged pores and redness from laziness and use of shower soap on face
15. itching, irritabilty and general disease
16. swelling, bruising, nausea, high fever, punctured lung, diarrhea, gasping, choking and moaning etc.
and we do this why....?
pros must outweigh cons in some universe.
This is one of our few nights off. We're almost done. Home for three days off, three days' worth of tour, and then more of the above "wake. repeat. wake. repeat." for a week or so in japan in australia. I have the image of that frog experiment in which the frog will jump out of hot water but not if he starts in the water cold, warmed, gradually unknowing to an unnatural and untimely end. Brian and I are both starting to get chronic airportitis, that feeling you also get in the supermarket or the drugstore if you go at 3 am and you walk dazed down an aisle, forgetting what a supermarket or drugstore is for. We have started to sleep while sitting, and we have started to think that banging our heads together on the plane, to see what kind of sound it REALLY makes, is a good time. Things are weird. We baaa like sheep being dragged around by ropes constantly and find it hilarious. Nobody understands.
Talking with the journalists is a trip. They generally love the record...due out April 18th. It's called "Yes, Virginia". Nobody in Europe gets the reference. "Aren't you afraid that this is too personal music?" What a question. We talk a lot about Virginia, the letter, the idea. Believing in things you cannot see. Trusting. Hardly an interview without the state of current events fitting in with the whole theme of the record title and the songs....the current mess over folks denying the holocaust, free speech being censored, the cartoon Muhammad issue...all of it converging over hotel lobby coffee tables. We did a naked photo shoot in germany because we were too lazy to get dressed.
But before I left for the hellhole of a promo-tour, there was The Cardinal.
You have learned from a previous post that I am not a hippie.
To add my typical-amandian disclaimer pre-able to this story, as i must, i am not a Nature Person either. I generally don't get nature and I certainly don't usually get Art about Nature. I have an aversion to paintings of Nature and songs about birds the way I assume anybody of discerning taste does. Nature just seems like such an easy target. It's like a love song. It's there, it's great, we know, why bother? But this is obviously teenage hangover and short-sighted, and the best Art is the probably the rare Tasteful Nature painting and the Tasteful Love Song (done only, I am convinced, by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, John Lennon or equivalent).
In any event, this Cardinal showed up shortly after I got back from the last leg and before I left for my solo show and promo trip to New York a few weeks ago.
He arrived with a THWOK on my window. I heard him from the bathroom and rushed into the kitchen, expecting to see a dead, or at least unconscious, bird on my fire escape. I knew that THWOK sound, birds had come and mistaken my window for safe passage before. But he was perched there, fully conscious, all nature-y looking with his red redness and his little black mask and disarmingly cute yellow little beak and now-very-popular-with-the-girls-in-new-york unihawk/mullet hairdo. And I felt heavy for this bird. He had obviously flown into the window thinking it was part of the sky. Damn humans, I cursed us, why must we fuck up the sky by building apartments with windows, thus screwing up the birds forever. Oh, but I was wrong. In a few moments time, he flew into the window again. Full force. THWOK. And then again. THWOK. Each time his beak and head would make full impact on the upper pane of my kitchen window and then he would re-alight onto the railing of the fire escape outside my second-story kitchen window. And now I was mystified and terrified. What on earth was he DOING? I taped up a piece of paper, an old letter from a dead friend, to the window, hoping this would aid him in de-mystifying the window-sky continuum.
The next day, around the same time, he came back.
THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. I was really distressed. The paper hadn't worked. I opened the window, from the top. My movement scared him away, but sure enough, after a few minutes he came back. I stood there, perfectly still and bare feet freezing from the arctic air pouring onto the floor (it was about thirty-five degrees outside). I just waited. Then the oddest thing happened: he flew into the space where the window HAD been, fluttered all confused, didn't fly into the room and quickly retreated back to a tree. So, I thought, this is a masochist bird. He doesn't WANT to come in. He wants to bash his head against my window. The next few days, he arrived at around mid-morning every day. he was usually at work by the time I woke up...in fact two days in a row I awoke - i kid you not - to the now sweet and familiar THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK that I had now become accustomed to. I tried my window experiment a few more times, always with the same results as before. I was fully freaked. It was going on five or six days and I was really starting to wonder what in hells name was going on. But at the same time I was secretly pleased. This bird had chosen MY window to exercise his weird S&M ritual and NOT somebody else's and I therefore must be Special. This of course made me feel horribly guilty and I wished the bird would go away and yet stay and yet go away and stay. He would come by when I was practicing the material for the solo show, which was during the afternoon, trying to nail down the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had beaten myself into trying to re-learn from my college years so I could feel like a Real Musician. I began to love the little chirping sound he would always make before he thwoked. I would hear it from anywhere in the apartment and go into the kitchen to watch. Better than television.
Lee's theory (we had several morning conversations over tea in his place to the soundtrack of THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK coming from my window downstairs) was that the bird was seeing his own reflection and wanted to fight. I didn't fully buy this theory. I've been looking out of my window for YEARS and I've never seen Cardinals in Combat.
Another friend of mine, who Knows Me Well, had a better theory: it was Matchbook.
Matchbook was my Boyfriend in college. I was 18. I met him my freshman year in the most weird and perfect way. I had been trying to overcome my fear of performing for years and years, and I scheduled my first performance in a room at the college where there was a grand piano and about 50 seats. I made flyers and shook sweating every night for two weeks. I planned about 13 or 14 songs. The night came and I played, for the 20-plus strangers assembled there, with my heart and head in tremors and my soul all terrified. I didn't have any friends at the time, barely, I didn't have anyone to talk to after the show...I just knew I had played, gotten over it, and had a recording that I could use as a demo tape with which to Move Forward With My Life. The concert ended at around 10 pm and I went back to my room and probably shook some more and killed time until my DJ slot at the college radio station, which was from 3-5am. I usually played a weird mix of The Legendary Pink Dots, Neubauten, marching band music and strange spoken word from the music library....generally I would just pile my favorite 17 records into a bag and make live mix tapes for myself. Nobody was listening, it was the middle of Connecticut at 4 am. I ONCE got a phone call, asking me about a song I had played. I was Amazed. So I was there, spinning records to myself, and the doorbell light went off. I walked through the stacks and stacks and doors and doors to answer it, expecting it was some upperclassman DJ hipster who needed to fetch some rare superchunk or guided by voices disc that he couldn't sleep without. But instead, it was Matchbook. He was standing there, with a lit birthday candle shoved into a twinkie on a paper plate and a bottle of PowerAde. He knew me, but I didn't know him, he said. He lived in the house/society where I was thinking about living, and he has seen my flyer so he and some others had come to check out the show. And he loved it, he said. My first fan. We fell in love later that night and we stayed in love for a while. But there was a problem, which was his heroin use. I came from a place where people did plenty of pot and acid, but these sorts of drugs were mostly unknown. Of course, for the first 4 seconds I had the initial "wow....cool" reaction, visions of Lou Reed & Co. dancing in my head, but on second five I was disgusted. Needles in veins, no good. He had a habit, as did other people in the house. And on top of that, he had a heart condition and a six inch scar to prove it, ran straight across his chest like a cracked riverbed from an operation he had had when he was five. After a few weeks of dating and being in love, I told him to Kick It or else forget about my girlfriend position. He agreed. A week later, he came to me one day. He knew my demand for honesty was high, and he said he was planning on shooting up that night, and that he didn't want to lie to me. Fine, I said, but I get to watch to see what all this fuss is about. Fine, he said. So along I went. We were in his friend's basement room and I watched the whole simple, knew-it-from-so-many-songs ritual. Jab. And then a few minutes later I decided I had had enough. I was hurt. So I told him I was leaving to go back to my own little cement dorm, and that he could come over for love and sleeping later. He agreed. I went home and staged a nice suicide with chocolate syrup and red food-coloring and ketchup and lots of cuts all over my legs and arms (mind you - I wasn't a cutter and never was...he was fully unprepared for this) and set up my tape recorder. Then I stripped the bedsheets, added blood, lay down and waited. About an hour later he came by (swtiched on the tape recorder) and let him discover me. I let him believe it for about 13 seconds. That was cruel enough. After that, our relationship improved. He was very angry at first but then glad I had taken the time and effort to express my frustration creatively. He kicked.
A month or so later, I took him home to meet my parents and My Friend Who Knows Me Well, and something terribly sad happened. He admitted to me that he had been using dope again and promised me that he was ready to stop. We visited the bathroom together and flushed the rest of his drugs down the toilet. It was fun. The next morning, my Friend and I took him out to Brunch. There was a piano there. I had been learning classical music and I was delighted by this piano and I left our breakfast conversation to sit down and (slightly terrified, but not so much this time) attempted to play the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had been learning. My second public performance, and people clapped. But Matchbook was nodding off at the table and, according to my Friend, heard not a note. He was Gone, eyes closed, head back. I was so naive I didn't realize what was happening, but my Friend pulled me aside in the driveway when we got home. I Never Tell You What To Do, he said, but This Time I Will. And he broke it down for me. And the weeks wore on, and the drugs went away again but I never fully trusted. But still, there was love, and there was art and we made films. He was an incredible artist, Matchbook, a brilliant painter, and we worked on our work together. He was studying hard and showed me his sketches and told me about what he was learning. We shared all of our music. We had amazing sex. For a while, things were wonderful. Then summer came, we went separate ways and effectively broke up. The next semester back in school, things were awkward but smoothed out, and then the day after christmas, he died. I got the phone call in my parents bedroom, since I was home for break. I remember putting down the phone and crying like an infant, huge racking sobs all night. His parents said it was heart problems. I'll never know what happened.
So my Friend's theory was that upon my commencing of the Chopin Practice (opus 9 no. 2), Matchbook showed up to repent and - stoned, of course - started hitting his sorry head against the window to deliver some undeliverable message. We had a good laugh over that one, but I don't believe in Things Like That, so this theory was also no good.
At this point, I actually considered looking for a bird specialist to ask, but decided against it, since I was enjoying the mystery. The morning I left for New York, he went absolutely nuts. He stayed by the window almost constantly for about two hours and THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOKED his little brain out. He obviously knew. I was sad to leave. I waited until the last minute to catch a cab for the train. I called my Friend and mused for a long time about this Red Masochist on my fire escape. I told him I had googled for Cardinals and Symbolism. Hope and Suffering were tied for first place. I looked out of the cafe car of the train and it was a gray gray sky as I pressed the phone to my head. I didn't want to tell you, he said, but I knew about the Suffering part...they're supposed to be harbingers of Death. Fantastic, I said. Maybe the train will crash.
When I came home, the Cardinal was still there. He kept the same hours and by now, it was like the sun rising and setting. THWOK was a comforting sound. I thought about blogging about him but didn't want to ruin the magic. After a space of weeks, I can finally admit that he's probably gone, the object of his affection plugging away in hotel lobbies across the wide wide sea. But my Friend was inspired to write his own reflection about the Masochist-Matchbook-Hope-Suffering-Bird and here I share it with you:
He pecked and fluttered---pecked and fluttered-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck
on the glass.
Scarlet symbol of “hope” and “suffering” the Cardinal at my window.
He draws me. Mystifies me. Pulled by the first peck he gave me:
into connection with his hope---hope of getting in---getting into me-that's what he wants, no?
Perhaps I'm more attached to his suffering---the suffering unrequited---for he suffers, no? Suffers for me, no?
His bloody passion reflected in his coat.
His pointed crown, tilting with strain in his trance of pain as he: peckspeckspeckspeckspeckspeckspecks.
I feel for him, I say, “Oh, here he is” when I hear, and turn to see the shock of crimson marked by the shroud of his black mask
and, bearing the weight of his need, I bend and soften toward his tiny body.
Hollow bones and feathers mostly (1.48 ounces)
Nothing. Nothing.
But the greatest weight I carry some days, seeing him at the windowpane. I face him separated: only a sheet of glass keeping me from his breath.
Am I his muse? He my poet? Does he know who I am, what I do? Does he need me? Need my help? Does he read me? Is he a mystic? A prophet? No, couldn't be . . . that's not why he's here.
Perhaps I'm wrong about The Cardinal, His Eminence-in the hierarchy of nature, which vested him with royal robes. Perhaps it is I investing the vested-one with hope and suffering--perhaps instead it is his own reflection in the glass compelling him and not at all me. With his “knock-and-you-shall-be-answered/ask-and-it-shall-be-given-you” attitude. Typical . . . for His Eminence-way--way up in the hierarchy--preening and pounding with his awe-inspiring vestments-his peaked crown. Tapping on the mirrored glass. Look at me look at me look at me! Can't get enough of him self. Narcissist!
Whoa, down boy . . . he is a bird after all and cannot be hopeful--suffer angst-can he? They cannot be egomaniacs, narcissists--read minds, or futures can they?
No. They can't. That's the answer.
He influences me though. Always comes in the mid-afternoon-pecking and fluttering persistent-passionate-entranced getting into me. He mesmerizes me always in the mid-afternoon. Influencing.
But today, the dawn of my departure on the train, he came rosy and early in the gray tired morning. Special visit---and pecked solid for an hour shouting . . .TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO. Or, perhaps: DON”T GO-DON”T GO---DON'T GO--DON”T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE.
Did he know I'd not be here a while? Know I was going, and in my going that I would suffer? Is he cautioning me? Does he peck a wake-up or a warning? Is this code reveille or taps? Do I need him, his help.
He makes me think. Influences me to reflect, to make meaning.
Is he my priest, my doctor, my shaman?
Am I his steward, his idol, his savior?
Is he god; god in this tiny red? God in nature as they say? Well, of course he is! What else could he be? Rorschach! That's what god is anyway. Project what you will, and learn about yourself from your divine projections--if you dare to look upon the face of god to learn. A red inkblot on a card . . .
The Cardinal: created in my image---yes, that's it, I'm god, I'm god too . . . that's what he's telling me. Because I've given him meaning, and life with hope, intention, goals and will. Made him who he is today. I and The Cardinal----gods we are. There, I've done it, found it . . . the world in a birdseed and hope in a drip of red.
Tea time---if they have any on this train . . .
cheek pressing the windowpane
Watch the bright sky of mind---steady-fickle---foolish
perfect.
xx
a
HOTEL INFO FOR TODAY in MILAN (tomorrow amsterdam, next day london)
Hotel:Una Tocq, Address: Via Tocqueville, Milan Tel: +39 02 6207 1
Check in by: 6:45pm (2 hours ahead is advisable – leave 1 hour minimum
Depart: 8:45pm Milan (MPX), Italy Flight KL163
Arrive:10:35pm Amsterdam, Holland
Hotel Information for tonight: American Hotel Amsterdam :
Leidsekade 97, 1017 PN AmsterdamTel #: +31 (0) 20 556300 www.amsterdamamerican.com
10.00:am check out. Transfer to Universal office for interviews – please have make up done
10.30: MTV.IT interview for MTV web site ( with digital camera) Sara Poma
10.50: PIG monthly alternative trend/culture mag, circ. 50.000: they request 1 casual shot
+quick Q&A on what DD are wearing
press interviews
11.10: RUMORE monthly specialized rock music magazine. Circ. 25.000.
11.30: ROLLING STONE monthly music and trend magazine, circ 50.000
11.50: break
12.05: XL monthly music-trend suppl.to LaRepubblica newspaper,circ.600.000
12.25 KATAWEB leading news portal, interview for their music page
12.45 ROCKOL music news site
1.05pm: lunch break
2.15: press interviews
2.15: ROCKSTAR monthly music magazine, circ. 40.000
2.35: JAM monthly specialized adult rock music mag, circ. 20.000
2.55: VOGUE leading fashion and trend monthly maga,circ. 100.000
3.15: ROCKHARD monthly specialized rock music magazine, circ. 15.000
3.35: ROCKSOUND monthly music mag
3.55: transfer to Radio Popolare, Via Ollearo 5
4.20: RADIO POPOLARE. Taped interview (show: “Patchanka”) for syndacation of
alternative radio stations across the country. To be aired in April
4.50 Transfer to ‘La Bottega Del Forno’ Corso Sempione 82
5.10 refresh make up
5.30 ALL MUSIC:Interview for ‘Extra’, weekly show dedicated to rock and alternative bands.
Dresden Dolls as special guests. 15 mins taped interview (will air in April)
6 00: end of promotion and leave for airport (50 mins drive)
8.45 take off for amsterdam - fly
10.35: Dutch rep. to meet band at airport - Drive to hotel.
Asleep by midnight. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. sometimes play small promo shows in smoky clubs or in fluorescent-lit painfully sterile radio stations.
and how does all this feel?
pros:
1. get to talk about myself, my songwriting, and my most innermost pain all day with foreign journalists who enthusiastically seem to think our new record is the shit
2. hopefully lay groundwork for good record sales in europe
3. meet label and publicist people who work their asses off for us, unseen all day in european offices
cons:
1. not enough sleep
2. no exercise
3. extremely limited access to loved ones, even via telephone
4. terrible food
5. constant back and neck ache from plane, taxi, train and van travel
6. voice loss
7. severe loss of sense of self
8. urge to kill others around self due to overexposure of personalities
9. bad air, bad decor and bad vibes abounding
10. glimpses of cities through bus and plane windows without even getting to take a walk outside the fucking hotel
11. overwhelming feelings of guilt for not enjoying myself when others would kill to be on a trip to promote their own record
12. almost no privacy
13.. italian wirless access (non-existant)
14. clogged pores and redness from laziness and use of shower soap on face
15. itching, irritabilty and general disease
16. swelling, bruising, nausea, high fever, punctured lung, diarrhea, gasping, choking and moaning etc.
and we do this why....?
pros must outweigh cons in some universe.
This is one of our few nights off. We're almost done. Home for three days off, three days' worth of tour, and then more of the above "wake. repeat. wake. repeat." for a week or so in japan in australia. I have the image of that frog experiment in which the frog will jump out of hot water but not if he starts in the water cold, warmed, gradually unknowing to an unnatural and untimely end. Brian and I are both starting to get chronic airportitis, that feeling you also get in the supermarket or the drugstore if you go at 3 am and you walk dazed down an aisle, forgetting what a supermarket or drugstore is for. We have started to sleep while sitting, and we have started to think that banging our heads together on the plane, to see what kind of sound it REALLY makes, is a good time. Things are weird. We baaa like sheep being dragged around by ropes constantly and find it hilarious. Nobody understands.
Talking with the journalists is a trip. They generally love the record...due out April 18th. It's called "Yes, Virginia". Nobody in Europe gets the reference. "Aren't you afraid that this is too personal music?" What a question. We talk a lot about Virginia, the letter, the idea. Believing in things you cannot see. Trusting. Hardly an interview without the state of current events fitting in with the whole theme of the record title and the songs....the current mess over folks denying the holocaust, free speech being censored, the cartoon Muhammad issue...all of it converging over hotel lobby coffee tables. We did a naked photo shoot in germany because we were too lazy to get dressed.
But before I left for the hellhole of a promo-tour, there was The Cardinal.
You have learned from a previous post that I am not a hippie.
To add my typical-amandian disclaimer pre-able to this story, as i must, i am not a Nature Person either. I generally don't get nature and I certainly don't usually get Art about Nature. I have an aversion to paintings of Nature and songs about birds the way I assume anybody of discerning taste does. Nature just seems like such an easy target. It's like a love song. It's there, it's great, we know, why bother? But this is obviously teenage hangover and short-sighted, and the best Art is the probably the rare Tasteful Nature painting and the Tasteful Love Song (done only, I am convinced, by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, John Lennon or equivalent).
In any event, this Cardinal showed up shortly after I got back from the last leg and before I left for my solo show and promo trip to New York a few weeks ago.
He arrived with a THWOK on my window. I heard him from the bathroom and rushed into the kitchen, expecting to see a dead, or at least unconscious, bird on my fire escape. I knew that THWOK sound, birds had come and mistaken my window for safe passage before. But he was perched there, fully conscious, all nature-y looking with his red redness and his little black mask and disarmingly cute yellow little beak and now-very-popular-with-the-girls-in-new-york unihawk/mullet hairdo. And I felt heavy for this bird. He had obviously flown into the window thinking it was part of the sky. Damn humans, I cursed us, why must we fuck up the sky by building apartments with windows, thus screwing up the birds forever. Oh, but I was wrong. In a few moments time, he flew into the window again. Full force. THWOK. And then again. THWOK. Each time his beak and head would make full impact on the upper pane of my kitchen window and then he would re-alight onto the railing of the fire escape outside my second-story kitchen window. And now I was mystified and terrified. What on earth was he DOING? I taped up a piece of paper, an old letter from a dead friend, to the window, hoping this would aid him in de-mystifying the window-sky continuum.
The next day, around the same time, he came back.
THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. I was really distressed. The paper hadn't worked. I opened the window, from the top. My movement scared him away, but sure enough, after a few minutes he came back. I stood there, perfectly still and bare feet freezing from the arctic air pouring onto the floor (it was about thirty-five degrees outside). I just waited. Then the oddest thing happened: he flew into the space where the window HAD been, fluttered all confused, didn't fly into the room and quickly retreated back to a tree. So, I thought, this is a masochist bird. He doesn't WANT to come in. He wants to bash his head against my window. The next few days, he arrived at around mid-morning every day. he was usually at work by the time I woke up...in fact two days in a row I awoke - i kid you not - to the now sweet and familiar THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK that I had now become accustomed to. I tried my window experiment a few more times, always with the same results as before. I was fully freaked. It was going on five or six days and I was really starting to wonder what in hells name was going on. But at the same time I was secretly pleased. This bird had chosen MY window to exercise his weird S&M ritual and NOT somebody else's and I therefore must be Special. This of course made me feel horribly guilty and I wished the bird would go away and yet stay and yet go away and stay. He would come by when I was practicing the material for the solo show, which was during the afternoon, trying to nail down the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had beaten myself into trying to re-learn from my college years so I could feel like a Real Musician. I began to love the little chirping sound he would always make before he thwoked. I would hear it from anywhere in the apartment and go into the kitchen to watch. Better than television.
Lee's theory (we had several morning conversations over tea in his place to the soundtrack of THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK coming from my window downstairs) was that the bird was seeing his own reflection and wanted to fight. I didn't fully buy this theory. I've been looking out of my window for YEARS and I've never seen Cardinals in Combat.
Another friend of mine, who Knows Me Well, had a better theory: it was Matchbook.
Matchbook was my Boyfriend in college. I was 18. I met him my freshman year in the most weird and perfect way. I had been trying to overcome my fear of performing for years and years, and I scheduled my first performance in a room at the college where there was a grand piano and about 50 seats. I made flyers and shook sweating every night for two weeks. I planned about 13 or 14 songs. The night came and I played, for the 20-plus strangers assembled there, with my heart and head in tremors and my soul all terrified. I didn't have any friends at the time, barely, I didn't have anyone to talk to after the show...I just knew I had played, gotten over it, and had a recording that I could use as a demo tape with which to Move Forward With My Life. The concert ended at around 10 pm and I went back to my room and probably shook some more and killed time until my DJ slot at the college radio station, which was from 3-5am. I usually played a weird mix of The Legendary Pink Dots, Neubauten, marching band music and strange spoken word from the music library....generally I would just pile my favorite 17 records into a bag and make live mix tapes for myself. Nobody was listening, it was the middle of Connecticut at 4 am. I ONCE got a phone call, asking me about a song I had played. I was Amazed. So I was there, spinning records to myself, and the doorbell light went off. I walked through the stacks and stacks and doors and doors to answer it, expecting it was some upperclassman DJ hipster who needed to fetch some rare superchunk or guided by voices disc that he couldn't sleep without. But instead, it was Matchbook. He was standing there, with a lit birthday candle shoved into a twinkie on a paper plate and a bottle of PowerAde. He knew me, but I didn't know him, he said. He lived in the house/society where I was thinking about living, and he has seen my flyer so he and some others had come to check out the show. And he loved it, he said. My first fan. We fell in love later that night and we stayed in love for a while. But there was a problem, which was his heroin use. I came from a place where people did plenty of pot and acid, but these sorts of drugs were mostly unknown. Of course, for the first 4 seconds I had the initial "wow....cool" reaction, visions of Lou Reed & Co. dancing in my head, but on second five I was disgusted. Needles in veins, no good. He had a habit, as did other people in the house. And on top of that, he had a heart condition and a six inch scar to prove it, ran straight across his chest like a cracked riverbed from an operation he had had when he was five. After a few weeks of dating and being in love, I told him to Kick It or else forget about my girlfriend position. He agreed. A week later, he came to me one day. He knew my demand for honesty was high, and he said he was planning on shooting up that night, and that he didn't want to lie to me. Fine, I said, but I get to watch to see what all this fuss is about. Fine, he said. So along I went. We were in his friend's basement room and I watched the whole simple, knew-it-from-so-many-songs ritual. Jab. And then a few minutes later I decided I had had enough. I was hurt. So I told him I was leaving to go back to my own little cement dorm, and that he could come over for love and sleeping later. He agreed. I went home and staged a nice suicide with chocolate syrup and red food-coloring and ketchup and lots of cuts all over my legs and arms (mind you - I wasn't a cutter and never was...he was fully unprepared for this) and set up my tape recorder. Then I stripped the bedsheets, added blood, lay down and waited. About an hour later he came by (swtiched on the tape recorder) and let him discover me. I let him believe it for about 13 seconds. That was cruel enough. After that, our relationship improved. He was very angry at first but then glad I had taken the time and effort to express my frustration creatively. He kicked.
A month or so later, I took him home to meet my parents and My Friend Who Knows Me Well, and something terribly sad happened. He admitted to me that he had been using dope again and promised me that he was ready to stop. We visited the bathroom together and flushed the rest of his drugs down the toilet. It was fun. The next morning, my Friend and I took him out to Brunch. There was a piano there. I had been learning classical music and I was delighted by this piano and I left our breakfast conversation to sit down and (slightly terrified, but not so much this time) attempted to play the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had been learning. My second public performance, and people clapped. But Matchbook was nodding off at the table and, according to my Friend, heard not a note. He was Gone, eyes closed, head back. I was so naive I didn't realize what was happening, but my Friend pulled me aside in the driveway when we got home. I Never Tell You What To Do, he said, but This Time I Will. And he broke it down for me. And the weeks wore on, and the drugs went away again but I never fully trusted. But still, there was love, and there was art and we made films. He was an incredible artist, Matchbook, a brilliant painter, and we worked on our work together. He was studying hard and showed me his sketches and told me about what he was learning. We shared all of our music. We had amazing sex. For a while, things were wonderful. Then summer came, we went separate ways and effectively broke up. The next semester back in school, things were awkward but smoothed out, and then the day after christmas, he died. I got the phone call in my parents bedroom, since I was home for break. I remember putting down the phone and crying like an infant, huge racking sobs all night. His parents said it was heart problems. I'll never know what happened.
So my Friend's theory was that upon my commencing of the Chopin Practice (opus 9 no. 2), Matchbook showed up to repent and - stoned, of course - started hitting his sorry head against the window to deliver some undeliverable message. We had a good laugh over that one, but I don't believe in Things Like That, so this theory was also no good.
At this point, I actually considered looking for a bird specialist to ask, but decided against it, since I was enjoying the mystery. The morning I left for New York, he went absolutely nuts. He stayed by the window almost constantly for about two hours and THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOKED his little brain out. He obviously knew. I was sad to leave. I waited until the last minute to catch a cab for the train. I called my Friend and mused for a long time about this Red Masochist on my fire escape. I told him I had googled for Cardinals and Symbolism. Hope and Suffering were tied for first place. I looked out of the cafe car of the train and it was a gray gray sky as I pressed the phone to my head. I didn't want to tell you, he said, but I knew about the Suffering part...they're supposed to be harbingers of Death. Fantastic, I said. Maybe the train will crash.
When I came home, the Cardinal was still there. He kept the same hours and by now, it was like the sun rising and setting. THWOK was a comforting sound. I thought about blogging about him but didn't want to ruin the magic. After a space of weeks, I can finally admit that he's probably gone, the object of his affection plugging away in hotel lobbies across the wide wide sea. But my Friend was inspired to write his own reflection about the Masochist-Matchbook-Hope-Suffering-Bird and here I share it with you:
He pecked and fluttered---pecked and fluttered-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck
on the glass.
Scarlet symbol of “hope” and “suffering” the Cardinal at my window.
He draws me. Mystifies me. Pulled by the first peck he gave me:
into connection with his hope---hope of getting in---getting into me-that's what he wants, no?
Perhaps I'm more attached to his suffering---the suffering unrequited---for he suffers, no? Suffers for me, no?
His bloody passion reflected in his coat.
His pointed crown, tilting with strain in his trance of pain as he: peckspeckspeckspeckspeckspeckspecks.
I feel for him, I say, “Oh, here he is” when I hear, and turn to see the shock of crimson marked by the shroud of his black mask
and, bearing the weight of his need, I bend and soften toward his tiny body.
Hollow bones and feathers mostly (1.48 ounces)
Nothing. Nothing.
But the greatest weight I carry some days, seeing him at the windowpane. I face him separated: only a sheet of glass keeping me from his breath.
Am I his muse? He my poet? Does he know who I am, what I do? Does he need me? Need my help? Does he read me? Is he a mystic? A prophet? No, couldn't be . . . that's not why he's here.
Perhaps I'm wrong about The Cardinal, His Eminence-in the hierarchy of nature, which vested him with royal robes. Perhaps it is I investing the vested-one with hope and suffering--perhaps instead it is his own reflection in the glass compelling him and not at all me. With his “knock-and-you-shall-be-answered/ask-and-it-shall-be-given-you” attitude. Typical . . . for His Eminence-way--way up in the hierarchy--preening and pounding with his awe-inspiring vestments-his peaked crown. Tapping on the mirrored glass. Look at me look at me look at me! Can't get enough of him self. Narcissist!
Whoa, down boy . . . he is a bird after all and cannot be hopeful--suffer angst-can he? They cannot be egomaniacs, narcissists--read minds, or futures can they?
No. They can't. That's the answer.
He influences me though. Always comes in the mid-afternoon-pecking and fluttering persistent-passionate-entranced getting into me. He mesmerizes me always in the mid-afternoon. Influencing.
But today, the dawn of my departure on the train, he came rosy and early in the gray tired morning. Special visit---and pecked solid for an hour shouting . . .TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO. Or, perhaps: DON”T GO-DON”T GO---DON'T GO--DON”T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE.
Did he know I'd not be here a while? Know I was going, and in my going that I would suffer? Is he cautioning me? Does he peck a wake-up or a warning? Is this code reveille or taps? Do I need him, his help.
He makes me think. Influences me to reflect, to make meaning.
Is he my priest, my doctor, my shaman?
Am I his steward, his idol, his savior?
Is he god; god in this tiny red? God in nature as they say? Well, of course he is! What else could he be? Rorschach! That's what god is anyway. Project what you will, and learn about yourself from your divine projections--if you dare to look upon the face of god to learn. A red inkblot on a card . . .
The Cardinal: created in my image---yes, that's it, I'm god, I'm god too . . . that's what he's telling me. Because I've given him meaning, and life with hope, intention, goals and will. Made him who he is today. I and The Cardinal----gods we are. There, I've done it, found it . . . the world in a birdseed and hope in a drip of red.
Tea time---if they have any on this train . . .
cheek pressing the windowpane
Watch the bright sky of mind---steady-fickle---foolish
perfect.
xx
a
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Oversaturation VS Mystique: round one
here seems the most appropriate place to bring the discussion.
the band, with it's never-ending crop of images and sound, has been led recently into a dialogue about overkill/oversaturation and when enough is enough. Everybody has their very different opinions about this, as, of course, everybody interested in the band (or products of the band) has their own agenda as well. Who the fuck is interested anyway and why? in what and how and how much and when is too much?
I hadn't thought too too much about it before. But the conversation was kicked off with the Sheet Music book, and then everything else got called into question. We live in the age of uberinformation, this we all know. I myself fall victim to it on a minutely basis, flailing late at night to pointlessly google one more obscure song reference, obsessively checking my email and cramming things into my head, reaching for ANYTHING to read when waiting ANYWHERE, unable to stop the floodgate of words and images that bombard me constantly, the mind candy that makes me think and ponder but rarely leaves me time to reflect. If I could read in my sleep, I would. But I shouldn't. i am currently reading a book called "in praise of slowness" and though i'd only recommend the first two chapters, the point is well taken. there's just too much shit, period.
We first realized that we needed to print sheet music about two years ago, when we started getting requests. people emailed asking for tabs and notation. then more people asked. then enough people asked for me to get off my ass and find a local guy in boston who could transcribe the songs (I can't write - and can barely read - musical notation) and the project seemed to be simple enough. But this being an Amanda Project, it was destined to take two more years, while I expanded and expanded the damn thing until the point where the actual musical notes and tabs seemed more like an Afterthought compared to the rest of the shit in the book.
i will admit it: I am an archivist of myself. I am a shameless archivist of the band. so it just seemed to make sense. Where and when else would have a limitless public 2D portfolio in which to cram all of the photos and notes and crap that has accumulated in various boxes over the years...boxes marked "of interest, to somebody, somewhere - do not throw away"? So I wrote a long introduction that ended being about 20 pages, pasted togehter all of the various album-related notes and photos and gave it to various friends to criticize and edit. Now, you see, I am not a prose writer. I can fake it as a blogger but you don't realize how forgiving you are being, yes you, as you sit there and read this. There are typos and run-ons and I am simply emptying out un-edited head-shit into your brain. Holding a book is different. a book is Real.
anyway, the thing grew and grew. ummmm. If i'm going to talk about this, i reasoned, why not that? and that? and that? and that and that and that? and so it went, becoming young-amanda-biography, band-biography, songwriter-101, and piano un-lesson all in one. i can't even read the whole damn thing myself, it spins my head. i think i will stick to writing blogs and songs in the future. my friend that knows me best says it all: "you use too many words". but that's beside the point. the point is, when we got to the 200-page completion of this beast, i had another Bright Idea. the Bright Idea was to include a DVD in the back of the book that held a 20-minute impromptu interview i did in the summer of 2003 with Wojtek Gwiazda, who was a film-making friend of my landlords who just happened to be in town with his fancy camera, sleeping upstairs. he wandered down into my bombed-looking mess of a kitchen, artwork and glue strewn everywhere and said
"what the hell is happening here?"
"I am making our album artwork."
"can i film you?"
"fuck yeah".
it was as simple as that, and wojteck (a charming and wonderful polish-canadian) came down and filmed. but this being the Cloud Club and the Cloud Club being what it is, the interview was of course also riddled with the Big Questions. why am i doing this. what is album artwork. and on and on. and mind you, i never thought this would really be seen by anyone, in fact, i forgot it existed for a while. i am in my boxer shirts and a stained wife-beater, all red and freckled from the july outside, looking like the unwashed, sleepless, manic, harried, starry-eyed workaholic that i was that month - two months before the record came out on our label. there's this great piece of spinach in my teeth. but there's also this beauty to it....this quiet, july morning, ivy-in-the-windows beauty that soaks onto the floor and into the discussion. it's ten in the morning, it's summer, it's roasting hot, pope is probably on the front steps drinking coffee, lee is probably upstairs screwing a tree to a picture frame, the birds outside are going nuts. it's perfect.
so, i thought, this 20-minute piece of thing would be the perfect addition to the Sheet Music Book, which, by this point, had evolved into an Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza. Anything and Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The First Dresden Dolls Album, where the songs came from, how the album was recorded....on and on. and this is where the resistance hit. pope and our Magic Manager cocked an eyebrow. isn't it a little overboard? isn't it just a little self-indulgent? do you REALLY need to include 20 minutes of yourself rambling on in your kitchen about the album artwork? don't you talk about it in the introduction?
i argued: i like it. i think the fans will like it. i think it's interesting. am i crazy?
no, they said, you're not crazy, but maybe you have no perspective. so i tried to look at things from their point of view. but i didn't agree. so more arguments ensued. it's expensive. it adds to the cost of the book. but - i argued - won't the added DVD be an incentive for people to buy it? no, they said, it won't. really? i have no experience with this, i said, i can only follow my gut. my gut says include it.
i sat with brian and our photographer friend kelly davidson and we watched it. i asked for their opinion. cut it, they said. so i cut some fat off of it.
then the late night discussions. what would elvis do? what would neil do? what would the beatles do? living in an image and video-saturated world, should we add our constant two cents or hold back? less is more. is less more?
wait, isn't more more? if less is more? what's more? less? is more less? if more is less, and less is more, doesn't that mean that more is still more? aghhghahghhhhAGAHAAGhhhhhghhahhahg.
oh, the ashtrays filled and the night wore on.
Manager says: "You need to protect your Mystique."
Amanda says: "But I don't want a Mystique. Has nobody noticed this obvious fact?"
this is where the blog came up in the conversation. Amanda says: it seems to me, a lot of people out there seem to appreciate the fact that brian and i have no interest in being Rock Stars and Superhumans With Mystique.
the manager says: but the printed word is very different from the visual image.
then i ate a christmas fish with a friend who used to work in the music business for a long, long time. he said: amanda, you will rue the day you stuck your hand in that toilet on your DVD. you aren't protecting your image. you're forcing people to ingest self-indulgent nonsense. why did you include that hour-long documentary on your DVD? It's BORING. you're not jessica simpson. get over it. you should not be directing the dresden dolls reality show.
in the wake of that, poetically, i needed to address the question of what to do with the 80+ hours of tour footage we shot on the october tour. edit it into another DVD? put it up in installments on the web? turn it into an andy warhol-esque art project, where we just stream 80 hours of footage of the band endlessly in the internet? so many choices. but all the recent feedback echoes in my head. we can output and output, but should we? discussions abounded. now i am confused. my gut has always served me well, but i also have no interest in being a stubborn, headstrong, sunset-boulevard casualty of my own archivist vanity. it's hard to know what to do. the superfans of the band will certainly be interested in any and everything, but they aren't the majority. how careful do we need to be? doesn't everyone edit everything as they want it nowadays ANYWAY? it's the FUTURE.
i have always been insecure about my totally narcissistic personality. i used to curse and psychically mutilate myself for years in high school and college, convinced that my own selfishness and vanity made it impossible for me to make a single authentic move, from writing a song to having a friendship to fucking brushing my teeth. my life was a movie. i like to think that i've transformed my attention-needing personality into something relatively constructive, and i've definitely managed through years of thinking and listening to understand myself better, to know when to step out of the spotlight, to shut the fuck up and listen instead. but it remains a sensitive nerve, i wonder why....i am actually making my living getting attention, up there on stage, applauded, focused on. and this is supposed to be normal (while in the back of my head all i hear is the tall adults of tiny childhood saying from above "just ignore her, she's just trying to get attention, poor girl" - sound familiar?). this is fingernails-on-the-blackboard-territory for me. i will never be fully confidant as close as i may feel, it's always possible for someone to stick an easy nail in my achilles' heel. just mumble the word "selfish" or better yet "attention-whore" and i'm likely to be seen in a corner taking deep breaths, trying very hard to quiet the bawling 8-year old inside.
in other news: christmas came and went, new years came and went (we played On Stage at our san francisco show with the String Cheese Incident, thus bursting our jamband hymens), and the 4-foot pine trees lay lifeless all over the sidewalks of new york this morning, waiting to be carted away by some magical elves.
AND
if your interest was piqued: the sheet music book/Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza/200-page monster (with interview included....yes, i won the argument....pyrrhic victory? time will tell) is now officially on sale for pre-order on the webstore:
http://www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls/
the band, with it's never-ending crop of images and sound, has been led recently into a dialogue about overkill/oversaturation and when enough is enough. Everybody has their very different opinions about this, as, of course, everybody interested in the band (or products of the band) has their own agenda as well. Who the fuck is interested anyway and why? in what and how and how much and when is too much?
I hadn't thought too too much about it before. But the conversation was kicked off with the Sheet Music book, and then everything else got called into question. We live in the age of uberinformation, this we all know. I myself fall victim to it on a minutely basis, flailing late at night to pointlessly google one more obscure song reference, obsessively checking my email and cramming things into my head, reaching for ANYTHING to read when waiting ANYWHERE, unable to stop the floodgate of words and images that bombard me constantly, the mind candy that makes me think and ponder but rarely leaves me time to reflect. If I could read in my sleep, I would. But I shouldn't. i am currently reading a book called "in praise of slowness" and though i'd only recommend the first two chapters, the point is well taken. there's just too much shit, period.
We first realized that we needed to print sheet music about two years ago, when we started getting requests. people emailed asking for tabs and notation. then more people asked. then enough people asked for me to get off my ass and find a local guy in boston who could transcribe the songs (I can't write - and can barely read - musical notation) and the project seemed to be simple enough. But this being an Amanda Project, it was destined to take two more years, while I expanded and expanded the damn thing until the point where the actual musical notes and tabs seemed more like an Afterthought compared to the rest of the shit in the book.
i will admit it: I am an archivist of myself. I am a shameless archivist of the band. so it just seemed to make sense. Where and when else would have a limitless public 2D portfolio in which to cram all of the photos and notes and crap that has accumulated in various boxes over the years...boxes marked "of interest, to somebody, somewhere - do not throw away"? So I wrote a long introduction that ended being about 20 pages, pasted togehter all of the various album-related notes and photos and gave it to various friends to criticize and edit. Now, you see, I am not a prose writer. I can fake it as a blogger but you don't realize how forgiving you are being, yes you, as you sit there and read this. There are typos and run-ons and I am simply emptying out un-edited head-shit into your brain. Holding a book is different. a book is Real.
anyway, the thing grew and grew. ummmm. If i'm going to talk about this, i reasoned, why not that? and that? and that? and that and that and that? and so it went, becoming young-amanda-biography, band-biography, songwriter-101, and piano un-lesson all in one. i can't even read the whole damn thing myself, it spins my head. i think i will stick to writing blogs and songs in the future. my friend that knows me best says it all: "you use too many words". but that's beside the point. the point is, when we got to the 200-page completion of this beast, i had another Bright Idea. the Bright Idea was to include a DVD in the back of the book that held a 20-minute impromptu interview i did in the summer of 2003 with Wojtek Gwiazda, who was a film-making friend of my landlords who just happened to be in town with his fancy camera, sleeping upstairs. he wandered down into my bombed-looking mess of a kitchen, artwork and glue strewn everywhere and said
"what the hell is happening here?"
"I am making our album artwork."
"can i film you?"
"fuck yeah".
it was as simple as that, and wojteck (a charming and wonderful polish-canadian) came down and filmed. but this being the Cloud Club and the Cloud Club being what it is, the interview was of course also riddled with the Big Questions. why am i doing this. what is album artwork. and on and on. and mind you, i never thought this would really be seen by anyone, in fact, i forgot it existed for a while. i am in my boxer shirts and a stained wife-beater, all red and freckled from the july outside, looking like the unwashed, sleepless, manic, harried, starry-eyed workaholic that i was that month - two months before the record came out on our label. there's this great piece of spinach in my teeth. but there's also this beauty to it....this quiet, july morning, ivy-in-the-windows beauty that soaks onto the floor and into the discussion. it's ten in the morning, it's summer, it's roasting hot, pope is probably on the front steps drinking coffee, lee is probably upstairs screwing a tree to a picture frame, the birds outside are going nuts. it's perfect.
so, i thought, this 20-minute piece of thing would be the perfect addition to the Sheet Music Book, which, by this point, had evolved into an Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza. Anything and Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The First Dresden Dolls Album, where the songs came from, how the album was recorded....on and on. and this is where the resistance hit. pope and our Magic Manager cocked an eyebrow. isn't it a little overboard? isn't it just a little self-indulgent? do you REALLY need to include 20 minutes of yourself rambling on in your kitchen about the album artwork? don't you talk about it in the introduction?
i argued: i like it. i think the fans will like it. i think it's interesting. am i crazy?
no, they said, you're not crazy, but maybe you have no perspective. so i tried to look at things from their point of view. but i didn't agree. so more arguments ensued. it's expensive. it adds to the cost of the book. but - i argued - won't the added DVD be an incentive for people to buy it? no, they said, it won't. really? i have no experience with this, i said, i can only follow my gut. my gut says include it.
i sat with brian and our photographer friend kelly davidson and we watched it. i asked for their opinion. cut it, they said. so i cut some fat off of it.
then the late night discussions. what would elvis do? what would neil do? what would the beatles do? living in an image and video-saturated world, should we add our constant two cents or hold back? less is more. is less more?
wait, isn't more more? if less is more? what's more? less? is more less? if more is less, and less is more, doesn't that mean that more is still more? aghhghahghhhhAGAHAAGhhhhhghhahhahg.
oh, the ashtrays filled and the night wore on.
Manager says: "You need to protect your Mystique."
Amanda says: "But I don't want a Mystique. Has nobody noticed this obvious fact?"
this is where the blog came up in the conversation. Amanda says: it seems to me, a lot of people out there seem to appreciate the fact that brian and i have no interest in being Rock Stars and Superhumans With Mystique.
the manager says: but the printed word is very different from the visual image.
then i ate a christmas fish with a friend who used to work in the music business for a long, long time. he said: amanda, you will rue the day you stuck your hand in that toilet on your DVD. you aren't protecting your image. you're forcing people to ingest self-indulgent nonsense. why did you include that hour-long documentary on your DVD? It's BORING. you're not jessica simpson. get over it. you should not be directing the dresden dolls reality show.
in the wake of that, poetically, i needed to address the question of what to do with the 80+ hours of tour footage we shot on the october tour. edit it into another DVD? put it up in installments on the web? turn it into an andy warhol-esque art project, where we just stream 80 hours of footage of the band endlessly in the internet? so many choices. but all the recent feedback echoes in my head. we can output and output, but should we? discussions abounded. now i am confused. my gut has always served me well, but i also have no interest in being a stubborn, headstrong, sunset-boulevard casualty of my own archivist vanity. it's hard to know what to do. the superfans of the band will certainly be interested in any and everything, but they aren't the majority. how careful do we need to be? doesn't everyone edit everything as they want it nowadays ANYWAY? it's the FUTURE.
i have always been insecure about my totally narcissistic personality. i used to curse and psychically mutilate myself for years in high school and college, convinced that my own selfishness and vanity made it impossible for me to make a single authentic move, from writing a song to having a friendship to fucking brushing my teeth. my life was a movie. i like to think that i've transformed my attention-needing personality into something relatively constructive, and i've definitely managed through years of thinking and listening to understand myself better, to know when to step out of the spotlight, to shut the fuck up and listen instead. but it remains a sensitive nerve, i wonder why....i am actually making my living getting attention, up there on stage, applauded, focused on. and this is supposed to be normal (while in the back of my head all i hear is the tall adults of tiny childhood saying from above "just ignore her, she's just trying to get attention, poor girl" - sound familiar?). this is fingernails-on-the-blackboard-territory for me. i will never be fully confidant as close as i may feel, it's always possible for someone to stick an easy nail in my achilles' heel. just mumble the word "selfish" or better yet "attention-whore" and i'm likely to be seen in a corner taking deep breaths, trying very hard to quiet the bawling 8-year old inside.
in other news: christmas came and went, new years came and went (we played On Stage at our san francisco show with the String Cheese Incident, thus bursting our jamband hymens), and the 4-foot pine trees lay lifeless all over the sidewalks of new york this morning, waiting to be carted away by some magical elves.
AND
if your interest was piqued: the sheet music book/Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza/200-page monster (with interview included....yes, i won the argument....pyrrhic victory? time will tell) is now officially on sale for pre-order on the webstore:
http://www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls/
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