i am home for about 36 hours. the bus dropped me off at home this morning at around 9. i always love that feeling when the bus pulls up to my actual apartment building, suddenly being in a space warp, like the scene in the fifth element where the take-out chinese place actually comes to your apartment window instead of yo' lazy ass having to walk down the street. the roving coffin-bed and makeshift home i've slept in is mere yards from my actual resting place and kettle. it's, like, queer. we had a bona fide raging party for all of two hours last night after the show in sayreville, managing to cram all of member of the red the red paintings, sxip and dancers of ladybird, our entire crew, barnaby and his boyfriend and 8 other random people in the front lounge of the bus while brian DJ'd from his computer (lots of Boyz II Men and Jackson Five) and we tried to drain of all the leftover rider beer. it was truly wonderful to watch. trash and i slow danced, 8th-grade style. the buzz and the smiling and the wild hands as people talked about things with sore throats and mad gestures all around me, it's what i want, i only had to close my eyes and actually pay attention to it for a second, it's the only song i want to hear most of the time, all of those people talking at once.
i am sad to see this tour over, i am sad to say goodbye to the red paintings. trash (the lead singer) is from my planet, running around trying to make the impossible happen, organizing live painters and human canvasses (that are painted black and then designed with day-glo paint that teh band supplies during the bands'set). last night i painted a canvas on stage and actually created something not painful to look at. it was a wonderful goodbye present for me and them both. trash left a canvas out in the lobby of the starland ballroom and every person at the show painted a portion of the surface, creating a masterpiece of love. it will hang on the wall of wherever i live until i die. barnaby brought a pastel portrait he'd been working on and blew everybody's brains out with his genius, a bunch of brigaders brought birthday cake (the band is officially SIX tomorrow, we're getting OLD) and though i can barely talk today, i don't mind. i fucking love my band, i fucking love our fans.
i went to desi's new loft a few hours ago to get my hair cut, and stared into the void of his brand-new stainless steel kitchen sink with my eyes closed and the water swooshing over my head and mark came up behind us to offer the information that the news had just announced that elephants were self-aware. then he walked away again.
......................................
now
I rarely post about politics but fuck it:
from a moveon.org email i got today:
"
We've got less than 192 hours to go before Election Day. So if you've never made a political call before in your life—now's the time. This week can be a turning point, but we need everyone pushing together to tip it over the top. You can get started right now by clicking here.
http://pol.moveon.org/phone/volunteer?id=9332-2677099-CZCdaRdhvBE.JNf2J4WaBg&t=2
"
YES: the scary 2006 elections are in a few days, comrades, and many people my age or younger don't really see how they can change an increasingly fucked-up system. it's huge and daunting.
However, it's also the future. the internet and the magic of PHONES has made it possible to take a couple hours out of your life, or LESS, and help change the course of events in what's going to be an HISTORIC election. lots of the races in many states are PAINFULLY close.
You can use your phone, call voters, even attend (or throw, for fucks sake) a party in your neighborhood where everyone makes calls together.
Using this resource to call active voters to convince them to get out and vote is crucial.
Even if you're too young to be registered to vote: YOU CAN DO THIS, your voice doesn't have to wait until you turn fucking 18.
from the callforchange.org website:
"This year, victory will come down to voter turnout. We've found the Democratic-leaning people who often don't vote in mid-term elections like this one. If we can just get these “unlikely voters” to vote, they'll provide a winning margin in a whole bunch of races.
Over 30 races are in a dead heat – margins of a few thousand or few hundred votes. We’ve tested these calls, and we know they work – the people we talk to are much more likely to turn out. Your calls could tip the balance – but we're in a daily struggle to make sure we're reaching more voters than the Republicans’ infamous turnout program. Can you help?"
if i know anything about our fanbase, you're not shy folks.
please give this a shot and also pass the info on to others via your blog, myspace page, whatever you can.
here is the link again for emphasis:
http://pol.moveon.org/phone/volunteer?id=9332-2677099-CZCdaRdhvBE.JNf2J4WaBg&t=2
ok.
******************************************************************
on a less serious and more rock note:
if you're in NYC or in town for the CMJ music marathon this weekend, here's what to see:
(venue info up at http://prod1.cmj.com/marathon/)
if you personally run into any of these folks (lots of these venues are small) say hello from me, they're all allies.
.......................................
TUESDAY
mo pitkin's
THE RED PAINTINGS & SXIP SHIREY
Tue 10/31 9 pm
http://www.mopitkins.com/
*NOTE, this is not an official CMJ event*
last chance to catch the red paintings before they jet for aussie.
also, ask anyone who saw him open for us this last tour: sxip is a one-man wonder of amazingness.
.......................................
Rocks Off Boat Cruise
World Inferno Friendship Society
Tue 10/31 11:15 pm
the legendary punk rock big band. prepare to get sweat on and possibly punched. dancing/drinking is obligatory.
.......................................
WEDNESDAY
Midway
Jake Brennan
Wed 11/01 11:00 pm
a boston hero, jake sings true blues rock and roll. wicked old school solo guitar, for fans of the rock.
.......................................
THURSDAY
The Tank
Ho-Ag
Thu 11/02 10:15 pm
another boston band, very experiemental jagged rock. awesome guys.
Union Pool
The Fatales
Thu 11/02 12:00 am
beautiful hooky indie rock, i've been trying to see these guys live for years.
Living Room
Casey Dienel
Thu 11/02 12:00 am
casey sings gorgeous flapper-y and sweet piano tunes.
she's native, so if you miss her (or can't make it to see her open for me at the paradise in boston on nov 27th),
check out her site and find her some other way.
.......................................
FRIDAY
Hiro Ballroom @ Maritime Hotel
Erase Errata
Fri 11/03 07:45 pm
grrl indie rock, very post-punk-wave-angular and jarring but somehow awesome.
.......................................
SATURDAY
Canal Room
Saul Williams
Sat 11/04 10:00 pm
saul is a force of nature, electro/rapper/spoken-word/poet bad-ass. amazing stage enrgy, fucking inspiring.
okgo
love
a
p.s. i'll see a lot of you fuckers at the roundhouse in a few days. it's going to be epic.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
a months worth less
...................................................................
oct 23rd.
sitting in the Again Cafe of Nashville: the cafe coco, open 24 hours, playing hits of the eighties and making my life bright. before bonnaroo i waited for doni from trail of dead to show up here for two hours. i was so tired i fell asleep under a table in one of the smaller rooms. the cafe coco has a front and back yard, a huge porch and some tacky statues. it was here that i filmed the first (though it wound up on the cutting room floor) footage for the kaiser chiefs' video i made at bonnaroo. i put the tennis ball on the head of this madonna-like statue wrapped in christmas lights. it looked beautiful, all blinky.
i've been feeling this strange reluctance to blog lately. it's typical, there's just too much happening and i feel like i have to write something poetic and profound. fuckkit
i've had this one sitting in my outbox for about a month, i wrote it during the aussie tour and just didn't post it for reasons probably having to do with laziness, as it probably needed editing. now it doesn't need editing: it's "archival":
,..................................
(approx sept 17th)
we had our first shit show of the tour last night in melbourne.
yet shit show is relative.
there are certain nights when enough things conspire against you to make you want to just give up...pull a diva and flounce off stage in a flurry of kimonos saying (in a very high-pitched italian accent) I CANNOT VORK VEES ZEEEZZ CRAPPPP!!!!!!!!!!
we've been renting keyboards on this entire tour and this was the first night the company we were renting from didn't have a kurzweil. the control buttons of the kleyboard were much closer to the actual keys, so at the beginning of the set i immediately started alternately accidentally hitting the patch-change buttons (causing some interesting slap-bass, wind-chime and clavinova sounds to take the place of the piano during "sex changes"), knocking the the volume knob to zero by accident (causing a very noticable silence and accidental drum solo, and causing many running-around-stage-techs wondering why the keyboard had gone away) and accidentally hitting the instant-super-turbo-reverb button (making the piano sound like all my bloody valentine's releases were being played simultaneoulsly). this was all just in the first 5 minutes of the show. add to that the two keys that instantly broke, and the gerbil-being-strangled persistant pitch that was coursing through the monitors due to some sort of magnetic field/aussie-alien invasion problem, and i knew this was going to be a shit show. i also realised that this was the show that had been ADDED in melbourne after the first one sold out, so we didn't have our ueber-forgiving, hard-core fanbase. most of the audeince had never seen us. and they were seeing a shit show. however.
i know, from road experience, that a shit show doesn't exist. one can just use these technical difficulties as fuel for one's emotional fire, bare all warts and hope that the audience will love you for your vulnerable & honest self. i was also tired as shit, after almost five straight days of flying every morning and never getting a full nights rest. i was asleep an hour before we hit stage. peeling myself out of bed was almost impossible. peeling brian out of bed WAS impossible. we were downstairs in the lobby of our hotel, ten minutes late for our ride to the club, wondering where he was. we called his room. we banged on the door. no answer. ultimately we had to get the porter to unlock his door and we all barged in and found him passed out in with the kind of oblivion that i believe is usually reserved for the dead. we were tired. we've been tired every show of this fucking tour, since we got here. somebody told me that jetlag realistically takes one day for every hour. i buy it. in this case, we'll be almost caught up by the time we fucking fly home.
i was watching my head during the show last night.
when things are particularly bad or frustrating, i tend to let go more. and by let go, i don't mean try less. i don't mean try harder. i think i simply mean i let things show more. i figure that if the audience knows what a terrible time you're having on stage, that you're actively wrestling demons as they look on, they might see more. appreciate more. care more? i don't know.
i watch this happen with my voice. true to form and raining and pouring, my voice also crapped out about halfway through the set (probably due to the lack of sleep and warming up, but add in the overcompensation for the shitty piano and you've got a winning combination). once is really goes, i let it. i try to keep it in the neighbourhood of what pitch it's supposed to be hitting, but otherwise i let it do what it wants. trying to make it sound pretty, or powerful, when i know i'm just doing more damage can be impossible. but i trust people to hear it for what it is. it's a trick. "i am in pain tonight and too tired to be playing a rock show for you" my little voice seems to croak "maybe for this reason you will take pity on me and hear my songs with a very sympathetic human ear". i think it probably hit people differently. one person may simply say "wow, the bitch can't sing. i want my money back." one person may say "wow. real." i also watch my flights of fancy as i listen to what sometimes amounts to little more than a croaking shadow of my usual voice. i usually start thinking about who is out there. our label reps. the promoters. the crew. some very childish part of me still hangs on to the naive fantasy that once people hear whats happening to me, sometimes night after night, even though I've made these decisions myself, even though I approved the adding of a second show in melbourne when we should've taken a day off to rest, even though things are thoroughly and utterly Under My Control....that they will magically see the error of the way we're/they're leading our life and run at breakneck speed to the closest phone booth and Call God, screaming "don't you see what's HAPPENING?.....sir, this is an OUTRAGE!" or more realistically, pick up their cell phones and call...who?....our agents? our manager? isn't there someone actually dedicated to organizing and caring about these things meticulously, who can stop me from overworking, who knows me better than myself? shouldn't someone be taking copious notes and making sure we do this right? this fantasy just won't go away no matter how much reality i face.
the reality is that there is no reality. the reality is that i make random decisions and sometimes they work. and often they don't. and that i'm usually way more interested in pleasing other people and appearing to be a hard worker than i am in my own health or art. nobody else actually looks out for that, nor should they. my fantasy entourage is never going to bust through the door and say "amanda, we've decided, from your peaked complexion and ragged voice that you need to take a nap this afternoon instead of doing press. we've cancelled all but one key interview. here's a cup of tea and some water. now go to sleep." nobody gets this kind of treatment. even madonna and britney-level pop stars have an entourage of specialized people...who need to get their own jobs done. i don't htink any of them have a mental and physical health professional onboard 24/7 who has the magic power to veto everybody else's decisions. nobody on the planet needs to give a shit about that but me and my few close friends (who are, probably very thankfully, never on tour with me), who have been warning me for a few years now to get off the rock hamster wheel lest it all end in tears. and, poetically, the sympathetic and distant readers of this journal. often when i read the comments on here i just feel like i'm reading one big terrible amanda-pity-party. but whatever, i'm not here to make anybody's fucking day. i'm here, for the moment, to bitch and complain. now i feel better. and maybe you feel better. and now we all love and understand each other's pain. now it's a love-fest. see how easy?
the last few weeks, since europe, have been a pretty uneventful blur of shows and airports. i've collected six decent memories since leeds, which is a stunningly good average. one (1) was sitting and drawing in a cafe in berlin the morning of our show. it was a perfect place to sit for three hours (cafe schwarz sauer, for you berliners, in kreuzberg...or was it prenzlauerberg?). two (2) was playing with my musical hero, edward ka-spel, in germany. i think i'll have to address that separately at some point. it was too overwhelming to go into right now. three (3) was walking on the beach in new zealand with ashley, who was kind enough to borrow his friend's car and drive me out to kare kare to the tall cliffs and the black sands and the little shells which i am keeping in a coffee cup stuffed with kleenex. four (4) was playing with ben folds, although it wasn't the actual playing that was the moment. it was the meeting him and knowing that he's one of the few people on the planet equipped to understand the sorts of things that i constantly think about. he's an ally. five (5) was finally seeing my friend glenn in brisbane and riding on his motorcycle out to his new house in the middle of the woods and seeing a goat and eating an egg-and-avacado sandwich while glenn played me the new go-bewteens CD. six (6) was watching the zen zen zo butoh theater perform at our show that night in brisbane. they covered the stage, all nearly-naked and real, and had another 8 actors out in the audience. the crowd sat down on the sticky club floor and the actors performed in place, the lights splashing off their white-painted bodies. people who rehearse for hours, unlike us. they were sublime. it was like we all fucking created a magical moment that lasted five whole minutes. we're going to try to import them over to london for the roundhouse shows.
i didn't collect any good memories in japan this time around. i spent most of the time trying to kick jetlag and trying to keep my head from exploding every time i looked out my 18th-floor hotel window at the 568,378 people simultaneously crossing the street in shibuya below. i swear, i've never seen so many people crossing one street. the show is japan was good but not great. the audience was very excited but very quiet. it was hard to understand.
everything else amounts to a neutral or bad memory of blurry travel and shows. good shows still don't leave good memories. maybe because there are too many of them, maybe because they don't leave a unique impression, maybe because i don't want that to be what makes me happy. who knows. i love it when it happens, i don't let myself be too bothered when it doesn't. increasingly, amanda amanda, it's only rock and roll. it all seems more and more absurd. watching "an inconvenient truth", al gore's documentary about the global warming crisis, was a nice moment of despair as i sat on the plane, leaving trails of jet fuel in my wake. i strongly urge you to see it if you haven't. having just read the mindblowing bill bryson book "a short history of nearly everything", it all wove together nicely (&i noticed someone commented about it.....all i have to say is YES YES YES, and i've been meeting people on the road who have read it and it is becoming a kind of cult, where we look into each others eyes and go...yes, yes, yes....we now share some cosmic connection through bill bryson and our knowledge of impending ice ages and taxonomy).
so also on the plus side i have finished two more books by mr. bryson ("a walk in the woods", a hilarious tale of hiking the appalachian trail and the brand-new "life and times of the thunderbolt kid", a childhood-in-the-golden-fifties memoir) and he is now among my favorite authors. his writing style in all three of these books tends to follow the same perfect pattern. pick a topic, write about it, yet go off on perfect tangents that are in turns gut-bustingly funny and deeply, the-world-is-about-end tragic. if he blogged, i'd read it.
we have three more shows, a quick sit-in with ben folds again back in melbourne, and then we fly home for a 10-day rest before we hit the states with the red paintings, who, along with jason webley, have been the most divine and perfect support band. you guys in the states are going to love them. imagine muse in costume with live painters on stage. they are sublime.
..................................................................................
(back to now, oct 23)
a month later, i can agree that the red paintings still are sublime. they're had a string of misfortune that seems almost biblical: tour manager left the tour, sound engineer left the tour, gear fell out of the back of their RV, the leas singer trash fell off of stage and developed a ancient-cell-phone-sized lump on his head. he's ok. they get better and better with every trial and tribulation. they play with their hearts.
the last show with ben folds was brilliant. he remains a steadfast ally.
we flew home, and i can't remember exactly how long we were there. a little under two weeks. i re-united, as i do, with my bed and pillows and bathtub, and tried not to think too much or do too much. i didn't touch the piano. i went to yoga every morning. there were meetings about the upcoming play, costume fittings, conference calls. i sat in the cafe drained cup after cup of green tea while alternately reading the boston globe and new york times and emptying my head of random thoughts and worries onto the pages of my moleskine journal. i sat with pope and gave editing feedback for the panic video. i ate chinese food and watched a movie with my sister.
i went to the boston music awards, where the band was nominated for six awards and won three. it didn't feel wonderful. i felt sad for my town because the event felt superficial and uncaring. brian dressed up in a full bear costume and kick-started a mosh pit during Gang Green's set but it wasn't enough to save the evening.
i walked my bicycle through the public garden and made eye contact with a man sitting on a bench. "do i know you?" he said, in a gravy french accent, "i think i know your face."
i stopped, said nothing, kick-standed my bike next to bench and sat down next to him. "i don't know, maybe you know my band. we're called the dresden dolls."
"no, i have never heard of this band."
he was older than me, probably in his sixties. he was an oncologist and professor at harvard. he invited me to dinner. i said no. but we sat there for about a half hour, talking about the nature of mortality and belief and emotion.
we had seen the same woman crying on the bench across the way, about ten minutes before. she had been talking on the phone. we discussed cell phone technology and how it affected human interaction.
we took some photos of each other with his new digital camera. with the ducks in the background.
i had picked up a fallen leaf from one of the maple trees that was all green-gold-flaming-red, intending to take it home and press it in the book i was reading. i gave it to him and kissed his cheek and walked my bike away without turning around.
that was my (#1) decent distinctive memory from my off time. my (2) decent distinctive memory from off time was going to see the secret machines play in the round at avalon. we all ended up at my house and though my distinctive memories of the event are very very dark gray (i wouldn't call it a full blackout) there was much piano-playing and laughing. i paid the next day. my (3) memory was seeing regina. she also played avalon, wore a sparkly top and has a band now. watching her slay the piano in front of two thousand people, when only a year and a half ago she had barely any fanbase in boston, was like mainlining hope into my veins. there are plenty of people do like good music. we spent some good time together and got to see each other again, this time at our show, a few days ago in minneapolis. we ate vegan soup and talked about a lot of things that bounce in our brains like labels and fame and how it doesn't matter what you say in an interview, the press can do what it wants with it. the only other (4) memory i can think of that is sharable was seeing elizabeth and the catapult play at the middle east. i liked them so much i asked them to open up for my solo show in boston on november 27th, so if you come you will see what i mean.
then i re-packed my red suitcase and we left for tour.
i packed my rollerskates but i don't think i am going to get a chance to use them.
this tour has been back to happy basics, i am in the dresden dolls and not a pissed-upon opening band. i have art-allies on the road with me in the human forms of sxip shirey (our fucking amazing MC and circus composer), katie kay and erin of Ladybird (who have been doing twisted dance routines during our set, you may recognize them as d'grrlz from the dresden dolls vs. panic video) and our crew has been functioning with love and precision. we've had time to see friends on the road and catch up with other musicians....david j came out in LA and treated us to his minibar when the hotel kicked us out of the bar, in san fran we saw the whole sleepytime gorilla museum/faun fables crew and thomas dolby, whose daughter is a fan (and she also made an excellent assistant during one of paul nathan's magic act - and speaking of paul nathan we saw his magic little theater & absinthe-bar digs and they are incomparable), i hooked up with victor from the violent femmes in milwaukee and saw his built-by-hand-with-love home recording studio, where hopefully the dolls can make an impromptu mellotron and bongo record someday, and i got to see aberdeen city open up for the electric six in portland. i got to take a nap with lane in chicago, jeffers brought some homemade chocolate in chicago and some wonderful fans of ours in san diego brought us homemade mango salsa and guacamole. this is what makes tour bearable.
but the highlight was portland, where i took a full two days off and bought a plane ticket to catch up with the crew while they rode the bus to minneapolis.
it was there that i finally got some breathing room and true time to myself, and i sat down to start writing the play we're about the perform, in earnest. the rehearsals are two weeks away.
it's time. i should have done this months ago. but i didn't. i feel like mozart in amadeus trying to stave off the hoards...."it's all here in my noodle" i say crazily as the directors and set designers worryingly prepare for a show that doesn't exist yet. it exists. it's coming into existence, fastly and surely. it's just in my head and i need to get it out right.
we played at the crystal ballroom, then drank til the wee hours with aberdeen city and i parted ways with my crew and checked into a hotel. i walked to osco drug, bought a 75%-off terribly scented candle, 2 childproof lighters (i only needed one, once, but that's how they came) and some iboprofen and spent the entire next day moving between four stations in the hotel room 1) bathtub, which i kept at a tepid temperature for hours with my terribly scented candle burning brightly by my side 2) floor, where i would read prostrate on a towel until i got cold and would return to bathtub 3) bed, where i would read prostrate on the quilt until i got cold and would return to bathtub and 4) desk chair, where i would read (email, mostly) upright until i got cold and would return to bathtub. i became very wrinkled and eventually dressed myself and headed to powell's where, after my baptism, i felt finally ready to start my writing process in earnest.
powell's (www.powellsbooks.com) is a portland landmark one of the biggest and best bookstores in the country. it's stacked and organized like a libarary and has an extensive zine collection and adjoining cafe. if i lived in portland i assume i would make frequent trips. i pored through the gunter grass section, bought some new books and a blank yellow notebook. then i took my bundle down the street to mary's all-nude revue (www.marysclub.com), another portland landmark, ordered myself a ginger ale and spring water, got my change in ones, and started to write up my notes. the girls were dancing to all variety of music, as they do, from the beatles to tom waits to the clash, and i occasionally looked up from my seat in the back, where i assume i too being eyed furtively by the other (mostly lonely, certainly all-male, most certainly not all-nude) patrons of the club. if the music was good and the stripper seemed like she was at least trying to entertain herself or anyone around, i would wander up to the stage and give her some ones. she would smile at me. then i would go back to my notebook and try to piece together the dresden dolls, war, art, rape, nightclub entertainment and the other pleasant and fun-for-the-family themes that are going to make up "the onion cellar".
the play has taken over my head, and it's not a bad thing. it's an awful lot like cramming for a test or writing an essay the night before it's due...which is the way i always functioned in school anyway. and i always knew i would do my work at the last minute, and after a while i gave up trying to be the sort of person who actually planned ahead and accepted that i was the sort of person who made specific plans ahead of time to not plan ahead. controlled procrastination.
so now i know how my life will be for the next week, i will tour at night and write during the day, and take a few moments out to maintain my band, since we have two massive shows about to go up in london on the 3&4. we are filming. if you are coming, FOR GODS SAKE LOOK NATURAL. that means, DONT LOOK NATURAL AT ALL. twist! scream! crawl!!! it's posterity!!!! we've put more effort into booking these london shows than almost any other show in history. the line-up in insane: Margaret Cho, Edward Ka-Spel, The Red Paintings, Jason Webley, Sxip Shirey, Baby Dee, Circus Krin&Jonas (yes, the very ones with their very wheel of death), Future Cinema, Zen Zen Zo from australia, art from Nick Vargelis, the Pish Dolls, fancy burlesque, aerial feats and more more more more more. brigade folks from all about europe are coming to art out. i am excited yet daunted by the organizational nightmare.
...........................
(now is now not now. now it's oct 24. it's later, but soon will be earlier)
in atlanta, next to criminal records at aurora coffee, trying to wrap this up in some meaningful way.no way.
here are some open letters anyway...
dear the man in the hotel exercise room in portland,
i'm sorry if i made you uncomfortable if you noticed i was crying while doing my workout on the elliptical machine. i was listening to a really good song and getting good ideas for my play and got all emotional.
love
amanda
dear the guy who posted his fantasy about me offering you a cigarette as a response to the last blog,
i only bum cigarettes from other people, not the other way around. you will have to change your fantasy sorry.
love
amanda
dear the yeah yeah yeahs,
i watched your DVD in preparation and for inspiration in making our own in a few weeks and it looked like you had a hard show and the audience was kind of lame. that sucks.
love
amanda
dear the electric six,
you rocked live and it was nice to see you and fuck the jocks your political statements did not fall on deaf ears. i hope you get what you want and that the rest of the road is kind to you.
love
amanda
dear cloudy gray sunglasses,
where did you go? i miss you a lot.
love
amanda
dear matt pepe,
i DID put you on the guestlist but the club fucked up. it wasn't my fault. please stop bad-mouthing me to our hometown friends, i want only peace.
love
amanda
dear Barbara Ehrenreich,
"nickel and dimed" was amazing, thank you for writing it. i just finished it and my head was pried nicely open.
love
amanda
dear cafe meshuggah in st. louis,
thank you for being such a perfect Again cafe and thanks for finding me when i lost my wallet. i will be back soon
love
amanda
dear the man who walked into the dressing room while i was naked in milwaukee,
don't feel too bad because generally i don't mind people seeing me naked and i'm sorry if the security was kind of mean to you but you shouldn't have sneaked back into a land where you don't belong.
love
amanda
dear the security staff of the club in perth,
you guys treated our crew so badly that we're never coming back to your club. fuck you and try being nicer to people, it works.
love
amanda
dear the terribly scented candle i left in the hotel in portland,
i'm sorry if you felt abandoned but i had no checked luggage and frankly you were way too heavy to take in my backpack on the way to minneapolis. i left a note with housekeeping to keep you if they wanted and hopefully you have found a nice home with some nice people.
love
amanda
p.s.
i now have my own myspace page. i'll gradually be moving my diary over here for good so if you're reading this elsewhere, soon it will be living on the dolls site and at www.myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer.
be. friend. me.
oct 23rd.
sitting in the Again Cafe of Nashville: the cafe coco, open 24 hours, playing hits of the eighties and making my life bright. before bonnaroo i waited for doni from trail of dead to show up here for two hours. i was so tired i fell asleep under a table in one of the smaller rooms. the cafe coco has a front and back yard, a huge porch and some tacky statues. it was here that i filmed the first (though it wound up on the cutting room floor) footage for the kaiser chiefs' video i made at bonnaroo. i put the tennis ball on the head of this madonna-like statue wrapped in christmas lights. it looked beautiful, all blinky.
i've been feeling this strange reluctance to blog lately. it's typical, there's just too much happening and i feel like i have to write something poetic and profound. fuckkit
i've had this one sitting in my outbox for about a month, i wrote it during the aussie tour and just didn't post it for reasons probably having to do with laziness, as it probably needed editing. now it doesn't need editing: it's "archival":
,..................................
(approx sept 17th)
we had our first shit show of the tour last night in melbourne.
yet shit show is relative.
there are certain nights when enough things conspire against you to make you want to just give up...pull a diva and flounce off stage in a flurry of kimonos saying (in a very high-pitched italian accent) I CANNOT VORK VEES ZEEEZZ CRAPPPP!!!!!!!!!!
we've been renting keyboards on this entire tour and this was the first night the company we were renting from didn't have a kurzweil. the control buttons of the kleyboard were much closer to the actual keys, so at the beginning of the set i immediately started alternately accidentally hitting the patch-change buttons (causing some interesting slap-bass, wind-chime and clavinova sounds to take the place of the piano during "sex changes"), knocking the the volume knob to zero by accident (causing a very noticable silence and accidental drum solo, and causing many running-around-stage-techs wondering why the keyboard had gone away) and accidentally hitting the instant-super-turbo-reverb button (making the piano sound like all my bloody valentine's releases were being played simultaneoulsly). this was all just in the first 5 minutes of the show. add to that the two keys that instantly broke, and the gerbil-being-strangled persistant pitch that was coursing through the monitors due to some sort of magnetic field/aussie-alien invasion problem, and i knew this was going to be a shit show. i also realised that this was the show that had been ADDED in melbourne after the first one sold out, so we didn't have our ueber-forgiving, hard-core fanbase. most of the audeince had never seen us. and they were seeing a shit show. however.
i know, from road experience, that a shit show doesn't exist. one can just use these technical difficulties as fuel for one's emotional fire, bare all warts and hope that the audience will love you for your vulnerable & honest self. i was also tired as shit, after almost five straight days of flying every morning and never getting a full nights rest. i was asleep an hour before we hit stage. peeling myself out of bed was almost impossible. peeling brian out of bed WAS impossible. we were downstairs in the lobby of our hotel, ten minutes late for our ride to the club, wondering where he was. we called his room. we banged on the door. no answer. ultimately we had to get the porter to unlock his door and we all barged in and found him passed out in with the kind of oblivion that i believe is usually reserved for the dead. we were tired. we've been tired every show of this fucking tour, since we got here. somebody told me that jetlag realistically takes one day for every hour. i buy it. in this case, we'll be almost caught up by the time we fucking fly home.
i was watching my head during the show last night.
when things are particularly bad or frustrating, i tend to let go more. and by let go, i don't mean try less. i don't mean try harder. i think i simply mean i let things show more. i figure that if the audience knows what a terrible time you're having on stage, that you're actively wrestling demons as they look on, they might see more. appreciate more. care more? i don't know.
i watch this happen with my voice. true to form and raining and pouring, my voice also crapped out about halfway through the set (probably due to the lack of sleep and warming up, but add in the overcompensation for the shitty piano and you've got a winning combination). once is really goes, i let it. i try to keep it in the neighbourhood of what pitch it's supposed to be hitting, but otherwise i let it do what it wants. trying to make it sound pretty, or powerful, when i know i'm just doing more damage can be impossible. but i trust people to hear it for what it is. it's a trick. "i am in pain tonight and too tired to be playing a rock show for you" my little voice seems to croak "maybe for this reason you will take pity on me and hear my songs with a very sympathetic human ear". i think it probably hit people differently. one person may simply say "wow, the bitch can't sing. i want my money back." one person may say "wow. real." i also watch my flights of fancy as i listen to what sometimes amounts to little more than a croaking shadow of my usual voice. i usually start thinking about who is out there. our label reps. the promoters. the crew. some very childish part of me still hangs on to the naive fantasy that once people hear whats happening to me, sometimes night after night, even though I've made these decisions myself, even though I approved the adding of a second show in melbourne when we should've taken a day off to rest, even though things are thoroughly and utterly Under My Control....that they will magically see the error of the way we're/they're leading our life and run at breakneck speed to the closest phone booth and Call God, screaming "don't you see what's HAPPENING?.....sir, this is an OUTRAGE!" or more realistically, pick up their cell phones and call...who?....our agents? our manager? isn't there someone actually dedicated to organizing and caring about these things meticulously, who can stop me from overworking, who knows me better than myself? shouldn't someone be taking copious notes and making sure we do this right? this fantasy just won't go away no matter how much reality i face.
the reality is that there is no reality. the reality is that i make random decisions and sometimes they work. and often they don't. and that i'm usually way more interested in pleasing other people and appearing to be a hard worker than i am in my own health or art. nobody else actually looks out for that, nor should they. my fantasy entourage is never going to bust through the door and say "amanda, we've decided, from your peaked complexion and ragged voice that you need to take a nap this afternoon instead of doing press. we've cancelled all but one key interview. here's a cup of tea and some water. now go to sleep." nobody gets this kind of treatment. even madonna and britney-level pop stars have an entourage of specialized people...who need to get their own jobs done. i don't htink any of them have a mental and physical health professional onboard 24/7 who has the magic power to veto everybody else's decisions. nobody on the planet needs to give a shit about that but me and my few close friends (who are, probably very thankfully, never on tour with me), who have been warning me for a few years now to get off the rock hamster wheel lest it all end in tears. and, poetically, the sympathetic and distant readers of this journal. often when i read the comments on here i just feel like i'm reading one big terrible amanda-pity-party. but whatever, i'm not here to make anybody's fucking day. i'm here, for the moment, to bitch and complain. now i feel better. and maybe you feel better. and now we all love and understand each other's pain. now it's a love-fest. see how easy?
the last few weeks, since europe, have been a pretty uneventful blur of shows and airports. i've collected six decent memories since leeds, which is a stunningly good average. one (1) was sitting and drawing in a cafe in berlin the morning of our show. it was a perfect place to sit for three hours (cafe schwarz sauer, for you berliners, in kreuzberg...or was it prenzlauerberg?). two (2) was playing with my musical hero, edward ka-spel, in germany. i think i'll have to address that separately at some point. it was too overwhelming to go into right now. three (3) was walking on the beach in new zealand with ashley, who was kind enough to borrow his friend's car and drive me out to kare kare to the tall cliffs and the black sands and the little shells which i am keeping in a coffee cup stuffed with kleenex. four (4) was playing with ben folds, although it wasn't the actual playing that was the moment. it was the meeting him and knowing that he's one of the few people on the planet equipped to understand the sorts of things that i constantly think about. he's an ally. five (5) was finally seeing my friend glenn in brisbane and riding on his motorcycle out to his new house in the middle of the woods and seeing a goat and eating an egg-and-avacado sandwich while glenn played me the new go-bewteens CD. six (6) was watching the zen zen zo butoh theater perform at our show that night in brisbane. they covered the stage, all nearly-naked and real, and had another 8 actors out in the audience. the crowd sat down on the sticky club floor and the actors performed in place, the lights splashing off their white-painted bodies. people who rehearse for hours, unlike us. they were sublime. it was like we all fucking created a magical moment that lasted five whole minutes. we're going to try to import them over to london for the roundhouse shows.
i didn't collect any good memories in japan this time around. i spent most of the time trying to kick jetlag and trying to keep my head from exploding every time i looked out my 18th-floor hotel window at the 568,378 people simultaneously crossing the street in shibuya below. i swear, i've never seen so many people crossing one street. the show is japan was good but not great. the audience was very excited but very quiet. it was hard to understand.
everything else amounts to a neutral or bad memory of blurry travel and shows. good shows still don't leave good memories. maybe because there are too many of them, maybe because they don't leave a unique impression, maybe because i don't want that to be what makes me happy. who knows. i love it when it happens, i don't let myself be too bothered when it doesn't. increasingly, amanda amanda, it's only rock and roll. it all seems more and more absurd. watching "an inconvenient truth", al gore's documentary about the global warming crisis, was a nice moment of despair as i sat on the plane, leaving trails of jet fuel in my wake. i strongly urge you to see it if you haven't. having just read the mindblowing bill bryson book "a short history of nearly everything", it all wove together nicely (&i noticed someone commented about it.....all i have to say is YES YES YES, and i've been meeting people on the road who have read it and it is becoming a kind of cult, where we look into each others eyes and go...yes, yes, yes....we now share some cosmic connection through bill bryson and our knowledge of impending ice ages and taxonomy).
so also on the plus side i have finished two more books by mr. bryson ("a walk in the woods", a hilarious tale of hiking the appalachian trail and the brand-new "life and times of the thunderbolt kid", a childhood-in-the-golden-fifties memoir) and he is now among my favorite authors. his writing style in all three of these books tends to follow the same perfect pattern. pick a topic, write about it, yet go off on perfect tangents that are in turns gut-bustingly funny and deeply, the-world-is-about-end tragic. if he blogged, i'd read it.
we have three more shows, a quick sit-in with ben folds again back in melbourne, and then we fly home for a 10-day rest before we hit the states with the red paintings, who, along with jason webley, have been the most divine and perfect support band. you guys in the states are going to love them. imagine muse in costume with live painters on stage. they are sublime.
..................................................................................
(back to now, oct 23)
a month later, i can agree that the red paintings still are sublime. they're had a string of misfortune that seems almost biblical: tour manager left the tour, sound engineer left the tour, gear fell out of the back of their RV, the leas singer trash fell off of stage and developed a ancient-cell-phone-sized lump on his head. he's ok. they get better and better with every trial and tribulation. they play with their hearts.
the last show with ben folds was brilliant. he remains a steadfast ally.
we flew home, and i can't remember exactly how long we were there. a little under two weeks. i re-united, as i do, with my bed and pillows and bathtub, and tried not to think too much or do too much. i didn't touch the piano. i went to yoga every morning. there were meetings about the upcoming play, costume fittings, conference calls. i sat in the cafe drained cup after cup of green tea while alternately reading the boston globe and new york times and emptying my head of random thoughts and worries onto the pages of my moleskine journal. i sat with pope and gave editing feedback for the panic video. i ate chinese food and watched a movie with my sister.
i went to the boston music awards, where the band was nominated for six awards and won three. it didn't feel wonderful. i felt sad for my town because the event felt superficial and uncaring. brian dressed up in a full bear costume and kick-started a mosh pit during Gang Green's set but it wasn't enough to save the evening.
i walked my bicycle through the public garden and made eye contact with a man sitting on a bench. "do i know you?" he said, in a gravy french accent, "i think i know your face."
i stopped, said nothing, kick-standed my bike next to bench and sat down next to him. "i don't know, maybe you know my band. we're called the dresden dolls."
"no, i have never heard of this band."
he was older than me, probably in his sixties. he was an oncologist and professor at harvard. he invited me to dinner. i said no. but we sat there for about a half hour, talking about the nature of mortality and belief and emotion.
we had seen the same woman crying on the bench across the way, about ten minutes before. she had been talking on the phone. we discussed cell phone technology and how it affected human interaction.
we took some photos of each other with his new digital camera. with the ducks in the background.
i had picked up a fallen leaf from one of the maple trees that was all green-gold-flaming-red, intending to take it home and press it in the book i was reading. i gave it to him and kissed his cheek and walked my bike away without turning around.
that was my (#1) decent distinctive memory from my off time. my (2) decent distinctive memory from off time was going to see the secret machines play in the round at avalon. we all ended up at my house and though my distinctive memories of the event are very very dark gray (i wouldn't call it a full blackout) there was much piano-playing and laughing. i paid the next day. my (3) memory was seeing regina. she also played avalon, wore a sparkly top and has a band now. watching her slay the piano in front of two thousand people, when only a year and a half ago she had barely any fanbase in boston, was like mainlining hope into my veins. there are plenty of people do like good music. we spent some good time together and got to see each other again, this time at our show, a few days ago in minneapolis. we ate vegan soup and talked about a lot of things that bounce in our brains like labels and fame and how it doesn't matter what you say in an interview, the press can do what it wants with it. the only other (4) memory i can think of that is sharable was seeing elizabeth and the catapult play at the middle east. i liked them so much i asked them to open up for my solo show in boston on november 27th, so if you come you will see what i mean.
then i re-packed my red suitcase and we left for tour.
i packed my rollerskates but i don't think i am going to get a chance to use them.
this tour has been back to happy basics, i am in the dresden dolls and not a pissed-upon opening band. i have art-allies on the road with me in the human forms of sxip shirey (our fucking amazing MC and circus composer), katie kay and erin of Ladybird (who have been doing twisted dance routines during our set, you may recognize them as d'grrlz from the dresden dolls vs. panic video) and our crew has been functioning with love and precision. we've had time to see friends on the road and catch up with other musicians....david j came out in LA and treated us to his minibar when the hotel kicked us out of the bar, in san fran we saw the whole sleepytime gorilla museum/faun fables crew and thomas dolby, whose daughter is a fan (and she also made an excellent assistant during one of paul nathan's magic act - and speaking of paul nathan we saw his magic little theater & absinthe-bar digs and they are incomparable), i hooked up with victor from the violent femmes in milwaukee and saw his built-by-hand-with-love home recording studio, where hopefully the dolls can make an impromptu mellotron and bongo record someday, and i got to see aberdeen city open up for the electric six in portland. i got to take a nap with lane in chicago, jeffers brought some homemade chocolate in chicago and some wonderful fans of ours in san diego brought us homemade mango salsa and guacamole. this is what makes tour bearable.
but the highlight was portland, where i took a full two days off and bought a plane ticket to catch up with the crew while they rode the bus to minneapolis.
it was there that i finally got some breathing room and true time to myself, and i sat down to start writing the play we're about the perform, in earnest. the rehearsals are two weeks away.
it's time. i should have done this months ago. but i didn't. i feel like mozart in amadeus trying to stave off the hoards...."it's all here in my noodle" i say crazily as the directors and set designers worryingly prepare for a show that doesn't exist yet. it exists. it's coming into existence, fastly and surely. it's just in my head and i need to get it out right.
we played at the crystal ballroom, then drank til the wee hours with aberdeen city and i parted ways with my crew and checked into a hotel. i walked to osco drug, bought a 75%-off terribly scented candle, 2 childproof lighters (i only needed one, once, but that's how they came) and some iboprofen and spent the entire next day moving between four stations in the hotel room 1) bathtub, which i kept at a tepid temperature for hours with my terribly scented candle burning brightly by my side 2) floor, where i would read prostrate on a towel until i got cold and would return to bathtub 3) bed, where i would read prostrate on the quilt until i got cold and would return to bathtub and 4) desk chair, where i would read (email, mostly) upright until i got cold and would return to bathtub. i became very wrinkled and eventually dressed myself and headed to powell's where, after my baptism, i felt finally ready to start my writing process in earnest.
powell's (www.powellsbooks.com) is a portland landmark one of the biggest and best bookstores in the country. it's stacked and organized like a libarary and has an extensive zine collection and adjoining cafe. if i lived in portland i assume i would make frequent trips. i pored through the gunter grass section, bought some new books and a blank yellow notebook. then i took my bundle down the street to mary's all-nude revue (www.marysclub.com), another portland landmark, ordered myself a ginger ale and spring water, got my change in ones, and started to write up my notes. the girls were dancing to all variety of music, as they do, from the beatles to tom waits to the clash, and i occasionally looked up from my seat in the back, where i assume i too being eyed furtively by the other (mostly lonely, certainly all-male, most certainly not all-nude) patrons of the club. if the music was good and the stripper seemed like she was at least trying to entertain herself or anyone around, i would wander up to the stage and give her some ones. she would smile at me. then i would go back to my notebook and try to piece together the dresden dolls, war, art, rape, nightclub entertainment and the other pleasant and fun-for-the-family themes that are going to make up "the onion cellar".
the play has taken over my head, and it's not a bad thing. it's an awful lot like cramming for a test or writing an essay the night before it's due...which is the way i always functioned in school anyway. and i always knew i would do my work at the last minute, and after a while i gave up trying to be the sort of person who actually planned ahead and accepted that i was the sort of person who made specific plans ahead of time to not plan ahead. controlled procrastination.
so now i know how my life will be for the next week, i will tour at night and write during the day, and take a few moments out to maintain my band, since we have two massive shows about to go up in london on the 3&4. we are filming. if you are coming, FOR GODS SAKE LOOK NATURAL. that means, DONT LOOK NATURAL AT ALL. twist! scream! crawl!!! it's posterity!!!! we've put more effort into booking these london shows than almost any other show in history. the line-up in insane: Margaret Cho, Edward Ka-Spel, The Red Paintings, Jason Webley, Sxip Shirey, Baby Dee, Circus Krin&Jonas (yes, the very ones with their very wheel of death), Future Cinema, Zen Zen Zo from australia, art from Nick Vargelis, the Pish Dolls, fancy burlesque, aerial feats and more more more more more. brigade folks from all about europe are coming to art out. i am excited yet daunted by the organizational nightmare.
...........................
(now is now not now. now it's oct 24. it's later, but soon will be earlier)
in atlanta, next to criminal records at aurora coffee, trying to wrap this up in some meaningful way.no way.
here are some open letters anyway...
dear the man in the hotel exercise room in portland,
i'm sorry if i made you uncomfortable if you noticed i was crying while doing my workout on the elliptical machine. i was listening to a really good song and getting good ideas for my play and got all emotional.
love
amanda
dear the guy who posted his fantasy about me offering you a cigarette as a response to the last blog,
i only bum cigarettes from other people, not the other way around. you will have to change your fantasy sorry.
love
amanda
dear the yeah yeah yeahs,
i watched your DVD in preparation and for inspiration in making our own in a few weeks and it looked like you had a hard show and the audience was kind of lame. that sucks.
love
amanda
dear the electric six,
you rocked live and it was nice to see you and fuck the jocks your political statements did not fall on deaf ears. i hope you get what you want and that the rest of the road is kind to you.
love
amanda
dear cloudy gray sunglasses,
where did you go? i miss you a lot.
love
amanda
dear matt pepe,
i DID put you on the guestlist but the club fucked up. it wasn't my fault. please stop bad-mouthing me to our hometown friends, i want only peace.
love
amanda
dear Barbara Ehrenreich,
"nickel and dimed" was amazing, thank you for writing it. i just finished it and my head was pried nicely open.
love
amanda
dear cafe meshuggah in st. louis,
thank you for being such a perfect Again cafe and thanks for finding me when i lost my wallet. i will be back soon
love
amanda
dear the man who walked into the dressing room while i was naked in milwaukee,
don't feel too bad because generally i don't mind people seeing me naked and i'm sorry if the security was kind of mean to you but you shouldn't have sneaked back into a land where you don't belong.
love
amanda
dear the security staff of the club in perth,
you guys treated our crew so badly that we're never coming back to your club. fuck you and try being nicer to people, it works.
love
amanda
dear the terribly scented candle i left in the hotel in portland,
i'm sorry if you felt abandoned but i had no checked luggage and frankly you were way too heavy to take in my backpack on the way to minneapolis. i left a note with housekeeping to keep you if they wanted and hopefully you have found a nice home with some nice people.
love
amanda
p.s.
i now have my own myspace page. i'll gradually be moving my diary over here for good so if you're reading this elsewhere, soon it will be living on the dolls site and at www.myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer.
be. friend. me.
Friday, October 06, 2006
dolls VS panic! is up
so, THE DRESDEN DOLLS VS PANIC! AT THE DISCO video is now up, and it's awesome:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ewqkF_lzqRQ.
everybody who has seen it so far seems to love it, but i did make a serious mistake sending an initial email to folks saying that "this is what i did in place of killing them or myself because the tour was so difficult". i guess you don't make jokes like that. i can't gloss over the fact that that i thought the tour WAS HELL when i was in it, despite the fact that i loved the guys in the band and, against all odds and everybody's assumption, really respected what they were trying to do.
i read their cover article in SPIN magazine the other night, which actually read like a 3-4 day tour diary of a chunk of time we were with them. it brought me right back to that month, which i have shelved as a distant nightmare. but the truth is the truth, even if it's only mine. if anyone watches that video and doesn't see the love and two bands having a good time, which we were, fuck 'em. that said: it's very difficult when a band exists as a concept in one world, as a musical entity in another, and as a group of human beings in yet a third. i know, because we are very much at the mercy of the same triple-edged sword. i've met or heard about tons of people who don't like my band simply because they think they shouldn't. and they've never seen us live, much less heard the music. sometimes it's hard to not take that personally.
why do i bring that up? because it's fucking difficult for me to try to navigate the fact that although i had plenty of love for the actual human beings in Panic! At The Disco, and beyond that a real sympathy and admiration for what they (and especially Ryan, the only one who I really got to know) were trying to achieve, i didn't have any fucking love for the environment i was in when we toured with them. some of their crew were downright mean, and many of their fans were the antithesis of Rock Love. however, since the tour, it's actually been really therapeutic to see some more crossover and gap-bridging between our fans and theirs via our forums (and plenty of our fans were just as judgmental and nasty as the panic fans) and i assumed that this video would dissolve that bullshit even further. so far, it has. i;ve learned more about who was there and paying attention. the panic fans that sucked the most were also the most vocal, and i'm only now seeing the nicer ones come out of the woodwork. people are way more likely to shout out "YOU SUCK!!!" than "YOU RULE!!!!" at an inopportune and quiet moment in a song. respectful and open-minded people will simply be listening. and plenty were. so thank you, you new fans who saw us on that tour. we're goddamn glad you're here. to any of the other panic fans who hated us: you're probably not reading this, but do us a favor...make yourselves useful and send us some concrete hatemail to post on our site. we're running low nowadays.
whatever, as i always say, this is how wars start. but for the record (and this IS THE RECORD, motherfuckers): it was also wonderful. i managed to have good times. i had fun making this video. i made some friends. i got our music out to the few people who were interested. i learned a lot of really, truly valuable lessons. i will never again regret i wasn't famous at 18. it could have been worse, the band COULD have easily been assholes and actively treated us badly. they weren't. they were sweethearts. looking back, would i do it again? fuck, yes. i don't believe in regret, and everything happens for a reason one way or another.
so that's the word on that. enjoy the movie.
meanwhile....i've been keeping a running tally of what to share about the last european/japan/aussie tour on paper and in my head, but i've been sleeping instead of putting it altogether. we leave for the US tour in a few days and i'll try to do it once i get my shit packed and together. i've been catching up all week, trying to act human, trying to pretend i don't feel buried. my right index finger is slightly sprained, giving me a wonderful excuse not to practice, but making me a but paranoid about how it will hold up on tour. i went to see the secret machines play in the round the other night at avalon in boston and they were intense, excellent musicians and fantastic people....if you have a chance to still catch them on tour, go. tonight, regina's playing tonight in the same club with her new band and i'm giddy....just about to leave to see her. fuck packing. i'll pack when i'm dead.
see you out there
and
go see "little miss sunshine" - best movie i've seen in ages.
love
amanda
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ewqkF_lzqRQ.
everybody who has seen it so far seems to love it, but i did make a serious mistake sending an initial email to folks saying that "this is what i did in place of killing them or myself because the tour was so difficult". i guess you don't make jokes like that. i can't gloss over the fact that that i thought the tour WAS HELL when i was in it, despite the fact that i loved the guys in the band and, against all odds and everybody's assumption, really respected what they were trying to do.
i read their cover article in SPIN magazine the other night, which actually read like a 3-4 day tour diary of a chunk of time we were with them. it brought me right back to that month, which i have shelved as a distant nightmare. but the truth is the truth, even if it's only mine. if anyone watches that video and doesn't see the love and two bands having a good time, which we were, fuck 'em. that said: it's very difficult when a band exists as a concept in one world, as a musical entity in another, and as a group of human beings in yet a third. i know, because we are very much at the mercy of the same triple-edged sword. i've met or heard about tons of people who don't like my band simply because they think they shouldn't. and they've never seen us live, much less heard the music. sometimes it's hard to not take that personally.
why do i bring that up? because it's fucking difficult for me to try to navigate the fact that although i had plenty of love for the actual human beings in Panic! At The Disco, and beyond that a real sympathy and admiration for what they (and especially Ryan, the only one who I really got to know) were trying to achieve, i didn't have any fucking love for the environment i was in when we toured with them. some of their crew were downright mean, and many of their fans were the antithesis of Rock Love. however, since the tour, it's actually been really therapeutic to see some more crossover and gap-bridging between our fans and theirs via our forums (and plenty of our fans were just as judgmental and nasty as the panic fans) and i assumed that this video would dissolve that bullshit even further. so far, it has. i;ve learned more about who was there and paying attention. the panic fans that sucked the most were also the most vocal, and i'm only now seeing the nicer ones come out of the woodwork. people are way more likely to shout out "YOU SUCK!!!" than "YOU RULE!!!!" at an inopportune and quiet moment in a song. respectful and open-minded people will simply be listening. and plenty were. so thank you, you new fans who saw us on that tour. we're goddamn glad you're here. to any of the other panic fans who hated us: you're probably not reading this, but do us a favor...make yourselves useful and send us some concrete hatemail to post on our site. we're running low nowadays.
whatever, as i always say, this is how wars start. but for the record (and this IS THE RECORD, motherfuckers): it was also wonderful. i managed to have good times. i had fun making this video. i made some friends. i got our music out to the few people who were interested. i learned a lot of really, truly valuable lessons. i will never again regret i wasn't famous at 18. it could have been worse, the band COULD have easily been assholes and actively treated us badly. they weren't. they were sweethearts. looking back, would i do it again? fuck, yes. i don't believe in regret, and everything happens for a reason one way or another.
so that's the word on that. enjoy the movie.
meanwhile....i've been keeping a running tally of what to share about the last european/japan/aussie tour on paper and in my head, but i've been sleeping instead of putting it altogether. we leave for the US tour in a few days and i'll try to do it once i get my shit packed and together. i've been catching up all week, trying to act human, trying to pretend i don't feel buried. my right index finger is slightly sprained, giving me a wonderful excuse not to practice, but making me a but paranoid about how it will hold up on tour. i went to see the secret machines play in the round the other night at avalon in boston and they were intense, excellent musicians and fantastic people....if you have a chance to still catch them on tour, go. tonight, regina's playing tonight in the same club with her new band and i'm giddy....just about to leave to see her. fuck packing. i'll pack when i'm dead.
see you out there
and
go see "little miss sunshine" - best movie i've seen in ages.
love
amanda
Monday, September 04, 2006
the condition of the bride
sleepless, mindless, on a plane from manchester to munich after three nights off in leeds.
disrupting the pattern of touring is heartbreaking, Real Life shoves itself in my face like a battering ram, and everything real looks so unreal, so untouchable, every common, mundane object takes on some sort of sacred quality.
i suppose disrupting the pattern of life is heartbreaking for anyone. maybe enlightening, always bizarre. there it is, everything you've gotten used to in stark relief to something else. look! you're tired! look! you're homesick! ha! thought you'd gotten used to that, no? look! you haven't been falling in love very much. i'm not homesick. it could be anybody's home...anywhere but here. right?
right. it's most fulfilling when i'm off on my own, the crew and the touring machine a distant nightmare, some life i try to forget i have. there are no airports, there is no soundcheck. i have no voice to lose, nobody to be. i think i'm permanently motion sick. going at a pace too fast for any amanda human. i know i sound like a broken record. i know. i know. i know. i know.
we finished the reading festival and the rest of the crew pushed on to munich via london for the time off. i got in a car that took me to a train that took me to a station in leeds, where ricky picked me up. i spent most of the next 24 hours in bed. new sheets. new house. new bed. he just moved in. it's beautiful. the house is on a quiet cobbled lane and the first morning i floated myself down to the cafe. everything was made of stone, dark, wet brick walls lined every street, covered in thick vines that caught the light. walked down the sidewalks with my eyes half closed. i'm in england...remind yourself, i'm in england and i'm freeeeee. i ran my hand against the walls and tried to walk without looking, dragging the roughness under my fingers, trying to pretend that i had recently had a near-death experience. i tried to imagine what it would be like to just be laying there, under the wheels of that drunken car. or in that bloody hospital bed with the beeep beeep beeeeeep getting more frightening. and thinking: oh what i wouldn't give for morning. roughness. walking. eyes closed. brick wall. fingers. now.....look you're alive.
in leeds, it rains for a few minutes and then it's blazing sunshine. then it pours again. people seem to be used to this. it's like boston weather on permanent times six fast-forward. the rain puddles and reflects the light and everything is always shining. i went outside yesterday to see what the weather was like and lay down in the grass where the shade from a big wall of trees met the sun. i decided to stay there. the dirt and the cut grass smelled wonderful and i was reminded that i never touch the ground anymore, barely ever see it. much less smell it. there's always something paved in the way. i used to grow out of the sidewalk.
the weekend before we left for tour, i went to harvard square and did the bride. it feels odd needing to explain what that means. everybody who knows me knows. for five or six years, before the band broke and we went off on endless touring, this was how i made most of my money. for a good part of the year i would work up to 4 or 5 days a week, doing 3 or 4 performances a day for an hour and a half each, totally exhausting myself. i always wanted to write a book about it. there's a booksworth in it. i was a living statue, a street performer, standing on a hidden pedestal wearing a wedding gown with my face painted white and every other inch of my skin covered with gloves and tulle. i would stand there, completely motionless and holding a bouquet of white daisy poms, until some passerby dropped money into a box at my feet. then i would come to life and share a short moment with the person who had set me free. i would give them a flower, sometimes a kiss to go along with it. i made, on average, forty dollars an hour. sometimes much more. sometimes much less. some people tossed in pennies. some people tossed in twenties. i was an art stripper. it was the most extraordinary job. i loved it with everything i had. i hated it sometimes. i dealt with the most obnoxious street scum assholes berating me (get a fucking job you whore) and encountered the most profound artists and poets (you have changed my life today), who would sometimes sit for hours and sketch, write poems about the bride and the crowd, young romantic boys and girls who would stop and stay, let themsleves fall in love with a stranger. i often fell in love back. then they'd leave.
a few blocks along the wall, then in the cafe, i sat down for a green tea and took out my journal. oh a little piece of paradise. one thing i love so much about england is the standard quality of music, everywhere. people sing on the train (probably because people also drink on the train), typically trashy bars play incredible songs. the leeds shopping mall was blasting radiohead. the cafe was playing the white stripes. the owner came over and sat down next to me. i ordered eggs. sat and wrote and waited and soaked it up like a sponge. i live for these moments that cost me nothing. for just a few cents a day - the cost of a cup of coffee - you can save a starving rock star. won't you please consider donating? by now i'm in hamburg, sitting at another one. the music here is terrible. there's soccer fever in the air. there's loud americans at the next table. no ground left to see, back in the grind but there's such a bright light at the end of the tunnel. i forget what it's like to like people sometimes.
children would be terrified or enraptured. countless marriage proposals. lots of tears. lots of screams of o-my-god-it's-real-you-scared-the-shit-out-of-me. i was free to fixate my gaze on anybody or anything i wanted, and it was perfectly acceptable. nobody looked away. they would stare right back. i would play games like this with people for stretches of up to five minutes. daring people. people would tease me, taunt me, poke me, try to make me laugh. tell me to get a fucking job. i earn more than you, fucker, i would always want to say to the meatheads who yelled that at me. and i'm doing more. when was the last time you made somebody fucking happy, you fucking twit?? who'd have guessed that under my mona lisa smile and longing eyes was a complete bitch. some days. not all days. not most days. most days i would just let it all slide off, let my heart surge with love when the harvard professors would stop and stare, and stay. sometimes i would put poems down at my feet. shakespeare. keats. most people didn't read it. but the ones who did...they did.
i've decided that what i like most in life isn't as obvious as singing or performing or writing. i think i've come to realize that my true passion is for surprising people. that's it. that's all. really. truly. one person, thousands of people. kin dof doesn't matter. the bride was very handy for this.
i traveled with her sometimes, packed up my box with wheels and did the bride in florida, LA, vegas, germany, australia. it was surprising how similar groups of people are all over the world. the same patterns. the same types. the stories and pieces of paper i collected could fill a two volume novel/scrapbook. everythings piled in a drawer at home. it wasn't until we really started touring, on stage, under lights, every night, that i realized how painfully perfect she was. a white knife that cut straight to the heart of all of this, so little in the way.
he took me to the hills outside leeds, to a rock formation called the cow and calf - guess which one is the small one. there was graffiti up there from the 1800s, when people really took the time to do it right. all etched out in olde englishe font, so much care put into every line and corner of each letter. it looked like the scottish highlands up there, all rocky and barren with the wind whipping something fierce, pale flowers and weeds clinging to the rocks for dear life. sheep tottering around aimlessly. it was a bank holiday and so families were doing what he said the english call "rambling". i can ramble. i can rumble. watch me. we went to a stand and ordered popsicles and for some reason i could not get over the hysterical sound of a grown man ordering a "lemon lolly and raspberry lolly". he told me to stop making fun of him. we sat and ate our lollies, wondering why we stupid enough to be eating anything frozen when it was freezing outside. he showed me the spot from which he painted a landscape when he was sixteen. later i saw a photograph of the painting. it was beautiful. he used to paint. now he doesn't. la la la la la....oh, manchester, so much to answer for....there is a light and it never goes out. etc. we used to do all these things. and now we get up in front of crowds of people and thrash around. we agreed it's ridiculous.
some famous german, nietzsche i think, said "all art aspires to the condition of music". i think all performance aspires to the condition of the bride. fifty or fifty thousand screaming fans couldn't touch the feeling of looking into one unsuspecting person's eyes for a few moments. they hadn't been expecting me. i hadn't been expecting them. we just found each other for a second and the world stops, something vital happens.
we find each other like this sometimes, this is what it's like. trying to prolong a moment like that almost never works.
while i was back in boston on the last break, i ventured out to the cambridge arts council and bought my $40 street performing permit for 2007. i left it tacked to my door. we left on some tour or another. ah yes, the panic tour. thank fucking god that's over. right. and came back. on friday night i crawled under my loft-bed and dragged out the box. the smell alone when i opened it up brought me right back, a totally unique combination of stale make-up and sour sweat and wig spray and powder. it's never changed at all. i dusted everything off and fell right back into 1999. the air outside starting to turn into fall, the airplanes making that sound that i swear is totally unique to chilly late summer mornings. it must have to do with the air pressure outside, but there's this SOUND they make, only when it's bright out, and morning, a piercing sound that sounds like cosmic paper ripping apart.
in germany, a week before, i watched the torrents of rain come down on the crowd while they played their set. not just any rain, it was biblical, sheets of rain and freezing. but the crowd, they all stayed and danced. they clappped, they lost their minds. the band knew how to take care of them. it's a different fucking world, it's a different set of expectations.
one evening was spent making up dirty limericks. he was much better at it than i was. i want our fans to dance, i said. he said, it's all nonsense. i said, the hit single will be called "you make them dance, i'll make them cry". i woke up in the morning with a limerick in my head. it wasn't funny, and it was too depressing to start the day off that way. i let him sleep, rolled off the bed and onto the floor, scratched it on a piece of cardboard that was lying there.
the basement of toscanini's smelled the same, the ice-cream cups all piled in the same place next to the freezer, the pipes all hanging janglely, and the little bathroom where i used to get dressed was still out of soap. i put on the dress, caked my face, donned the wig, pulled on my gloves, cut up the flowers with the scissors from upstairs. i felt like i was moving through a drawing of myself. my motor memory was right there, no time had passed. that walk from toscanini's to the spot across from au bon pain is always the most interesting, and totally different from the walk back when i'm finished. i am a grown woman, walking two city blocks and waiting at stoplights, wearing full bridal gear with veil and my face painted. it always gets some strange looks. i always felt this mixture of pride and embarrassment. nothing to see, nothing to see, please go about your business. then up to the pedestal, climb on top, fix my eyes on one spot and wait. i wondered if any dresden dolls fans would wander by and know it was me. the sun was in my eyes and i had to squint.
returning to the tour in germany i looked at my life like an outsider. the stultifying superficiality of the road and the care we all must take with each other, because every nerve seems to be a frayed one after four days on the road. the lack of privacy which has become de rigeur, shut shut shut shut shut your mind off, turn your body and your voice on, become somebody you were and remind yourslef that you'll sort it all out later. soon enough.
i find myself wanting less and less. and less and less and less and less and less. i know. i feel like i'm somehow disappointing everyone around me by not caring about certain things i used to care about. i think about january coming, with time to myself, time to learn how to play the piano, time to write new songs, time to become myself and everything else just pales. records not selling? that's fine. label is dropping us? wouldn't mind. world is ending? about time.
it all feels like a very irrelevant game compared to washing some dishes, running my hand against the wall, smelling the ground, feeling somebody's arms reach for me even if it's only for a second.
typical tourist influx, the passersby of harvard square on a random summer saturday, the harvard students and the average people. my wondering: there was one boy with a cure t-shirt who gave me a i-know-who-you-are smile. it was very sweet. but mostly it was glorious to stand there unknown and ignored or loved for standing on a street corner in a dress painted white. i can love everybody here so safely. everyone can love me but nobody can touch me. why did i ever think this was perfect. of course i know. it is perfect. i stood there for two hours in heaven. an old man in a tweed jacket with glasses came and stayed for a half an hour. he came back up for a final flower and we looked at each other for a long time. he knew. that was enough for me. that made my year worthwhile. we must be really close to the football stadium. i hear giant cheers. everyone at the bar was wearing a st. pauli shirt. it must be hunting season.
back in the bus, i try to care about our sets, throw myself into the music for two hours with everything i have and scratch off days on the calendar. all or nothing, all of this. sometime i look at brian and don't even recognize him. the unrecognizable has become common, i get it, i get it. i tried out a brand new song in bochum last night...i wrote it a few months ago. the long way out. it ties all of this together. it's the long way out. past the bar, and past the awning. past the yawning crowd. back into the end of harmony. back into the grind. back into the non-music land of music.
i dragged my box home, up the stairs to the apartment, and felt like i had given myself a profound pinch. i left it there, not unpacking the box or even counting the money i had made for several days. i almost wanted to just give it away. i used to think it was so absurd, to get paid for doing something that i probably would just do anyway. maybe that's why it's still so impossible for me to come to terms with the fact that i have a job. fucking ridiculous. it is. it's not. i don't expect anything. i expect everything. it's two o'clock, time for press.
an odd couple lay under the covers
who could never attach to their lovers
as she packed up to leave
he just smiled and agreed
"tis a joy reserved solely for others".
disrupting the pattern of touring is heartbreaking, Real Life shoves itself in my face like a battering ram, and everything real looks so unreal, so untouchable, every common, mundane object takes on some sort of sacred quality.
i suppose disrupting the pattern of life is heartbreaking for anyone. maybe enlightening, always bizarre. there it is, everything you've gotten used to in stark relief to something else. look! you're tired! look! you're homesick! ha! thought you'd gotten used to that, no? look! you haven't been falling in love very much. i'm not homesick. it could be anybody's home...anywhere but here. right?
right. it's most fulfilling when i'm off on my own, the crew and the touring machine a distant nightmare, some life i try to forget i have. there are no airports, there is no soundcheck. i have no voice to lose, nobody to be. i think i'm permanently motion sick. going at a pace too fast for any amanda human. i know i sound like a broken record. i know. i know. i know. i know.
we finished the reading festival and the rest of the crew pushed on to munich via london for the time off. i got in a car that took me to a train that took me to a station in leeds, where ricky picked me up. i spent most of the next 24 hours in bed. new sheets. new house. new bed. he just moved in. it's beautiful. the house is on a quiet cobbled lane and the first morning i floated myself down to the cafe. everything was made of stone, dark, wet brick walls lined every street, covered in thick vines that caught the light. walked down the sidewalks with my eyes half closed. i'm in england...remind yourself, i'm in england and i'm freeeeee. i ran my hand against the walls and tried to walk without looking, dragging the roughness under my fingers, trying to pretend that i had recently had a near-death experience. i tried to imagine what it would be like to just be laying there, under the wheels of that drunken car. or in that bloody hospital bed with the beeep beeep beeeeeep getting more frightening. and thinking: oh what i wouldn't give for morning. roughness. walking. eyes closed. brick wall. fingers. now.....look you're alive.
in leeds, it rains for a few minutes and then it's blazing sunshine. then it pours again. people seem to be used to this. it's like boston weather on permanent times six fast-forward. the rain puddles and reflects the light and everything is always shining. i went outside yesterday to see what the weather was like and lay down in the grass where the shade from a big wall of trees met the sun. i decided to stay there. the dirt and the cut grass smelled wonderful and i was reminded that i never touch the ground anymore, barely ever see it. much less smell it. there's always something paved in the way. i used to grow out of the sidewalk.
the weekend before we left for tour, i went to harvard square and did the bride. it feels odd needing to explain what that means. everybody who knows me knows. for five or six years, before the band broke and we went off on endless touring, this was how i made most of my money. for a good part of the year i would work up to 4 or 5 days a week, doing 3 or 4 performances a day for an hour and a half each, totally exhausting myself. i always wanted to write a book about it. there's a booksworth in it. i was a living statue, a street performer, standing on a hidden pedestal wearing a wedding gown with my face painted white and every other inch of my skin covered with gloves and tulle. i would stand there, completely motionless and holding a bouquet of white daisy poms, until some passerby dropped money into a box at my feet. then i would come to life and share a short moment with the person who had set me free. i would give them a flower, sometimes a kiss to go along with it. i made, on average, forty dollars an hour. sometimes much more. sometimes much less. some people tossed in pennies. some people tossed in twenties. i was an art stripper. it was the most extraordinary job. i loved it with everything i had. i hated it sometimes. i dealt with the most obnoxious street scum assholes berating me (get a fucking job you whore) and encountered the most profound artists and poets (you have changed my life today), who would sometimes sit for hours and sketch, write poems about the bride and the crowd, young romantic boys and girls who would stop and stay, let themsleves fall in love with a stranger. i often fell in love back. then they'd leave.
a few blocks along the wall, then in the cafe, i sat down for a green tea and took out my journal. oh a little piece of paradise. one thing i love so much about england is the standard quality of music, everywhere. people sing on the train (probably because people also drink on the train), typically trashy bars play incredible songs. the leeds shopping mall was blasting radiohead. the cafe was playing the white stripes. the owner came over and sat down next to me. i ordered eggs. sat and wrote and waited and soaked it up like a sponge. i live for these moments that cost me nothing. for just a few cents a day - the cost of a cup of coffee - you can save a starving rock star. won't you please consider donating? by now i'm in hamburg, sitting at another one. the music here is terrible. there's soccer fever in the air. there's loud americans at the next table. no ground left to see, back in the grind but there's such a bright light at the end of the tunnel. i forget what it's like to like people sometimes.
children would be terrified or enraptured. countless marriage proposals. lots of tears. lots of screams of o-my-god-it's-real-you-scared-the-shit-out-of-me. i was free to fixate my gaze on anybody or anything i wanted, and it was perfectly acceptable. nobody looked away. they would stare right back. i would play games like this with people for stretches of up to five minutes. daring people. people would tease me, taunt me, poke me, try to make me laugh. tell me to get a fucking job. i earn more than you, fucker, i would always want to say to the meatheads who yelled that at me. and i'm doing more. when was the last time you made somebody fucking happy, you fucking twit?? who'd have guessed that under my mona lisa smile and longing eyes was a complete bitch. some days. not all days. not most days. most days i would just let it all slide off, let my heart surge with love when the harvard professors would stop and stare, and stay. sometimes i would put poems down at my feet. shakespeare. keats. most people didn't read it. but the ones who did...they did.
i've decided that what i like most in life isn't as obvious as singing or performing or writing. i think i've come to realize that my true passion is for surprising people. that's it. that's all. really. truly. one person, thousands of people. kin dof doesn't matter. the bride was very handy for this.
i traveled with her sometimes, packed up my box with wheels and did the bride in florida, LA, vegas, germany, australia. it was surprising how similar groups of people are all over the world. the same patterns. the same types. the stories and pieces of paper i collected could fill a two volume novel/scrapbook. everythings piled in a drawer at home. it wasn't until we really started touring, on stage, under lights, every night, that i realized how painfully perfect she was. a white knife that cut straight to the heart of all of this, so little in the way.
he took me to the hills outside leeds, to a rock formation called the cow and calf - guess which one is the small one. there was graffiti up there from the 1800s, when people really took the time to do it right. all etched out in olde englishe font, so much care put into every line and corner of each letter. it looked like the scottish highlands up there, all rocky and barren with the wind whipping something fierce, pale flowers and weeds clinging to the rocks for dear life. sheep tottering around aimlessly. it was a bank holiday and so families were doing what he said the english call "rambling". i can ramble. i can rumble. watch me. we went to a stand and ordered popsicles and for some reason i could not get over the hysterical sound of a grown man ordering a "lemon lolly and raspberry lolly". he told me to stop making fun of him. we sat and ate our lollies, wondering why we stupid enough to be eating anything frozen when it was freezing outside. he showed me the spot from which he painted a landscape when he was sixteen. later i saw a photograph of the painting. it was beautiful. he used to paint. now he doesn't. la la la la la....oh, manchester, so much to answer for....there is a light and it never goes out. etc. we used to do all these things. and now we get up in front of crowds of people and thrash around. we agreed it's ridiculous.
some famous german, nietzsche i think, said "all art aspires to the condition of music". i think all performance aspires to the condition of the bride. fifty or fifty thousand screaming fans couldn't touch the feeling of looking into one unsuspecting person's eyes for a few moments. they hadn't been expecting me. i hadn't been expecting them. we just found each other for a second and the world stops, something vital happens.
we find each other like this sometimes, this is what it's like. trying to prolong a moment like that almost never works.
while i was back in boston on the last break, i ventured out to the cambridge arts council and bought my $40 street performing permit for 2007. i left it tacked to my door. we left on some tour or another. ah yes, the panic tour. thank fucking god that's over. right. and came back. on friday night i crawled under my loft-bed and dragged out the box. the smell alone when i opened it up brought me right back, a totally unique combination of stale make-up and sour sweat and wig spray and powder. it's never changed at all. i dusted everything off and fell right back into 1999. the air outside starting to turn into fall, the airplanes making that sound that i swear is totally unique to chilly late summer mornings. it must have to do with the air pressure outside, but there's this SOUND they make, only when it's bright out, and morning, a piercing sound that sounds like cosmic paper ripping apart.
in germany, a week before, i watched the torrents of rain come down on the crowd while they played their set. not just any rain, it was biblical, sheets of rain and freezing. but the crowd, they all stayed and danced. they clappped, they lost their minds. the band knew how to take care of them. it's a different fucking world, it's a different set of expectations.
one evening was spent making up dirty limericks. he was much better at it than i was. i want our fans to dance, i said. he said, it's all nonsense. i said, the hit single will be called "you make them dance, i'll make them cry". i woke up in the morning with a limerick in my head. it wasn't funny, and it was too depressing to start the day off that way. i let him sleep, rolled off the bed and onto the floor, scratched it on a piece of cardboard that was lying there.
the basement of toscanini's smelled the same, the ice-cream cups all piled in the same place next to the freezer, the pipes all hanging janglely, and the little bathroom where i used to get dressed was still out of soap. i put on the dress, caked my face, donned the wig, pulled on my gloves, cut up the flowers with the scissors from upstairs. i felt like i was moving through a drawing of myself. my motor memory was right there, no time had passed. that walk from toscanini's to the spot across from au bon pain is always the most interesting, and totally different from the walk back when i'm finished. i am a grown woman, walking two city blocks and waiting at stoplights, wearing full bridal gear with veil and my face painted. it always gets some strange looks. i always felt this mixture of pride and embarrassment. nothing to see, nothing to see, please go about your business. then up to the pedestal, climb on top, fix my eyes on one spot and wait. i wondered if any dresden dolls fans would wander by and know it was me. the sun was in my eyes and i had to squint.
returning to the tour in germany i looked at my life like an outsider. the stultifying superficiality of the road and the care we all must take with each other, because every nerve seems to be a frayed one after four days on the road. the lack of privacy which has become de rigeur, shut shut shut shut shut your mind off, turn your body and your voice on, become somebody you were and remind yourslef that you'll sort it all out later. soon enough.
i find myself wanting less and less. and less and less and less and less and less. i know. i feel like i'm somehow disappointing everyone around me by not caring about certain things i used to care about. i think about january coming, with time to myself, time to learn how to play the piano, time to write new songs, time to become myself and everything else just pales. records not selling? that's fine. label is dropping us? wouldn't mind. world is ending? about time.
it all feels like a very irrelevant game compared to washing some dishes, running my hand against the wall, smelling the ground, feeling somebody's arms reach for me even if it's only for a second.
typical tourist influx, the passersby of harvard square on a random summer saturday, the harvard students and the average people. my wondering: there was one boy with a cure t-shirt who gave me a i-know-who-you-are smile. it was very sweet. but mostly it was glorious to stand there unknown and ignored or loved for standing on a street corner in a dress painted white. i can love everybody here so safely. everyone can love me but nobody can touch me. why did i ever think this was perfect. of course i know. it is perfect. i stood there for two hours in heaven. an old man in a tweed jacket with glasses came and stayed for a half an hour. he came back up for a final flower and we looked at each other for a long time. he knew. that was enough for me. that made my year worthwhile. we must be really close to the football stadium. i hear giant cheers. everyone at the bar was wearing a st. pauli shirt. it must be hunting season.
back in the bus, i try to care about our sets, throw myself into the music for two hours with everything i have and scratch off days on the calendar. all or nothing, all of this. sometime i look at brian and don't even recognize him. the unrecognizable has become common, i get it, i get it. i tried out a brand new song in bochum last night...i wrote it a few months ago. the long way out. it ties all of this together. it's the long way out. past the bar, and past the awning. past the yawning crowd. back into the end of harmony. back into the grind. back into the non-music land of music.
i dragged my box home, up the stairs to the apartment, and felt like i had given myself a profound pinch. i left it there, not unpacking the box or even counting the money i had made for several days. i almost wanted to just give it away. i used to think it was so absurd, to get paid for doing something that i probably would just do anyway. maybe that's why it's still so impossible for me to come to terms with the fact that i have a job. fucking ridiculous. it is. it's not. i don't expect anything. i expect everything. it's two o'clock, time for press.
an odd couple lay under the covers
who could never attach to their lovers
as she packed up to leave
he just smiled and agreed
"tis a joy reserved solely for others".
Saturday, August 26, 2006
o fuck my mouth has fallen into the john
i'd been slowly and carefully composing a new diary entry in my head, which involved long-winded and clever meditations on the nature of art and street performance and blah blah blah (don't worry i'm sure i'll still wank it all over you once i get this out of my system) when my plans were laid to waste. the last 48 hours happened and it was all too good to skip.
we were home for about a week, and we've been back out on this european tour for about a week. it's an odd one, we have no bus. we're a crew of just 4, brian and me and emily and our wonderful sound-man psycho-dave, hopping from european city to european festival in planes and trains and automobiles and it's incredibly uncomfortable and disorienting. there is not only no home routine, there is no road routine, there is just chaos every day. my inner rainman is really bitching. one day in germany, next day in belgium, then next day england, next in germany, next in england. i've stopped noticing.
anyway.
i used to be REALLY bad about losing and breaking shit. beyond. i couldn't keep a set of keys or a wallet for more than a year and every item of clothing, body part, family heirloom and any other possibly portable-outside-of-my-home (and even indoors, things weren't necessarily safe) was invariably broken, lost, sprained, stained or otherwise mangled in my careless, billion-mile-an-hour clutches. at a certain point i realized that instead of adjusting my habits, which seemed impossible, i would simply adjust my sensitive attitude towards myself and my belongings and realize that they were simply fleeting, earthbased baubles, meant to be broken and lost ANYWAY in the great churning of cosmos movement (ohh and maybe i was just some cosmic helper, not only part of the universal puzzle but there to speed up the process of things!....oh!! special! special!! charming!) and fuck it let it break and let it get lost. i dun carrrre.
this may have started to be a decent solution for own collection of earthly goods and mortal coil, but it didn't make me many intimate friends as i was likely to break them. there was a time when i was about 22 when i remember absolutely Freaking Out. i had been living in my little harvard square sublet, street performing and working at toscanini's (the awesome ice cream & coffee shop) and basically living bohemian paradise before moving back to germany on my fully accidental graduate student scholarship. it was the day that i lost my wallet, my keys AND left the water running over a crate of strawberries in the kitchen sink for a full few hours until it hit me (one mile away) that things were getting out of control. i wondered if there was some kind of medication you could take for flakiness. i could go on and on about how i've left my wallet in my refridgerator, slept through my finals, accidentally brushed my teeth with shampoo, fallen over a 12-foot balcony, gone to the emergency room for drop-kicking a cactus which permeated my thick german army boots giving me possible tetanus, drank myself into a blackout in belgium and woken up naked and penniless in a strange....i'll stop there. you name it, if it was stupid, i've done it. i need to spare my mother the details. hi mom. i know you're reading this.
it wasn't too long after that i discovered sitting zen and started slowing my shit the fuck down, even a little bit, and i think i've made progress. i even fold my clothes out of the laundry (once or twice a year) and have started folding my clothes when i pack for tour (they do not stay that way after first unpacking). i try to make lists. i try to take deep breaths. i try to clean as i go. it is not at all natural. but it does feel amazing when it happens. i started wondering what it was that made this way, unlike some Other People that i knew who were clean, organized, dependable and otherwise upstanding compared to my overwhelming (but charming!) haphazardness.
i developed the theory a few years ago that i had, at one point in my warped life, decided that cleanliness and dependability were the polar opposite of freedom and independence and must therefor be avoided at all costs. this is, obviously, complete bullshit. the total freedom to make a complete fucking mess of my apartment as i write, compose, sort, correspond, paste and create is one of the things i hold dear. but it took me years to realize that i could create much more effectively with a clean space. the problem NOW is that it seems i reallly have to choose between one and the other. my space is never dirty so much as it is cluttered; lists and piles and unpacked packages and clothes tower in my room from the dawn til dusk and i usually start any given day with the cheerful optimism that i can spend the afternoon attacking the piles and then retire into an evening of artmaking. but i can't make art if the piles are there. so i work on the piles until 3 in the morning, fall into bed exhausted but feeling rather satisfied that, because i've made so much progress, tomorrow will be different. it's never true. i wake up to 74 emails, a load of complicated problems, more CDs from tour that i uncover, there's always something. i am unable to clear my mind. it stays perpetually cluttered. i think this is one of the essential keys to unlocking the mystery of Why I Cannot Write On The Road. things at home are hard enough, and when i start traveling my brain can barely keep up with the amount of daily to-do shit and stimulus that any creative output starts to seem like a distant dream. things come in, but don't come together. things come together when the table is clear, when i feel like my brain doesn't have mundane things to do. i've gotten to the point in my life where i feel like an "adult" because i am taking care of my "responsibilities" and the cost seems to have been the part of me that is an artist. self-fulfilling prophecy? probably. i thought that getting a team of managers would solve this problem but instead, because of the amount of shit involved with running a band, i spend more time keeping track of what people have and haven't actually taken care of. shit, i digressed.
-
it's 24 hours later but i must finish story......so. we came back on tour, played a few festival shows, and went to edinburgh for a few days off. i wanted to be at the fringe festival. i had wanted to be there for an entire month, but three days, with a show in the middle, was all i got. it was better than nothing, i fell into the fringe like a fucking junkie diving headfirst into a hefty-sized bag of dope...just walking down the street during the fringe is like paradise to me....theater everywhere, street performers everywhere, music everywhere. home. paradise. i found reggie watts, an amazing hip-hop/spoken word artist/singer/comedian and we spent the majority of the fringe hanging out and going to shows and generally making each other laugh. i took regina and her right-on russian mom over to his show (after hers, which was brilliant as always) and she loved him. everything felt good. even though i'd pulled my fucking neck out and spent every morning at the chiropractor. i turned my computer off and at this moment have an automatic message answering that i have vacated the planet and have over 450 mails to answer, post-spam. i don't care.
the second night, i was kicking it at the spiegel garden outside the fabulous famous spiegeltent, a portable wood-and-glass circus venue i've been in love with since i first laid eyes on it back in melbourne a few years ago, and a general meeting spot for actors and fringe folks til late late at night. i was moving too fast, trying to meet up with one person and another, and rushed off to use the bathroom (they have these trailer port-a-bathrooms off stationed there all month) and there was a line of five or six women waiting for the female toilet (as they call it in britain). there was nobody in the line for the men's. i went for the men's, out of habit. years of travel have made me impervious to such distinctions, but i do still take pains to look as gay boy as possible when walking into a men's room. i was wearing a freakish outfit (and i was at the fringe, for god's sake, where everybody's a fucking actor in a post-modern performance art piece anyway) so i figured i was fine. i got a few raised eyebrows from my friends at the urinals. warning: the following scene is about to become uncomfortably graphic. so i went into a stall, shuffling and huffing and covered with backpack and fanny pack (don't say that in the UK, they laugh their heads off at you because it translates to "vagina pack") and drink in hand and realized that i had to change my tampon. i usually use the sponge, but i was out of sponges, and i usually use applicator-less tampons, but i had left those at home in a packing snafu and so i was left with the box of super-absorbant tampax that i bought that day at the convenient store. i grabbed the box out of my backpack and ripped one open, whereupon it promptly fell on the floor of the stall and rolled neatly under the divider and into the well-polished shoe of a man at the urinal directly to my left. i made an attempt at retrieval while trying to utter a "he he why isn't this just delightfully funny" little chortle but my grabbing hands pushed mr. tampon further out of sight and at that moment i was distracted by my ringing phone (my blackberry, to be precise, or crackberry (as they call it in new york, or blackmailer, as they call it over here). my ringing phone was Fabian from future cinema, i was supposed to have a business meeting with him and we'd arranged he would call me when he got to the area. it felt urgent. we'd been trying to meet all day and night, and i didn't want to think i was blowing him off. i suppose i could have patiently ignored the call (ass on toilet seat, tampon-debacle in full swing) and waited for a calmer time, but noooo, i answered it. however, as i went to answer it i also realized that my Somewhat Feminine voice would give away my stall ruse, so i answered with a deep " Hullo" that was, uh, the best impresison of a man i could muster at the moment. only about two sentences were exchanged while i tried to gather my self, my wits and my tampax and as i rose from the throne, mid-conversation, my phone slipped out from between my ear and my neck. it was one of those beautifully cinematic slow-motion movements where my face contorts into a silent "NNNNNNOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" as i spin, looking toilet-ward, in just enough time to see it splash all swan-lake- like into the murky blue pond of port-a-john. this was a flushable port-a-john, so there was nobody else's piss to contend with but my own, and my hand instinctively shot into the murk to try to slavage my two-hundred dollar device (and, if possible, my business meeting). no suck fucking luck, it was frantically vibrating with a blank screen and i heard that electronic death toll ring.
the rest of the night was a wash (no pun intended) and i went home to email fabian that, though it sounded like the lamest excuse in the world, i had indeed dropped my toilet in the phone during our conversation and could we possibly re-schedule our appointment for tomorrow evening? i thought i heard you taking a piss, he said. my god, is it always that obvious? i do it all the time, does that mean EVERYBODY knows? at least i know now. i glumly attempted to remove all moving phone parts and covers and batteries and sim cards, letting them air out in the clear scottish breeze, but to no avail. the phone stayed dead and i found myself giving myself that familiar old lashing. stupid stupid girl!!! what are you thinking, using mens bathrooms and changing your tampax and disguising your voice for important business meetings all at the same time. BAD!!! grow up.
as my friend asked when i told his this story: ah, pretty telling. are you TRYING to flush your life away? this was food for thought.
perhaps. yeah. maybe. so??
things went from bad to worse the next night, when i decided that playing a THIRD show, after our spiegeltent show (relatively awesome) and future cinema event (also awesome - these people created a MAGIC fucking space in a building based on the original nosferatu...). brian went back to our communally rented apartment to hit the sack and i met up with reggie watts at the bongo club for the after-after party. we didn't have any songs planned, but we';d been beat-boxing on the street the day before and it sounded pretty good (well, HE sounded pretty good, he's reggie watts....i sounded like a white girl punk cabaret singer with a torn-up voice trying to beat-box...but, you know, charming!!!) so we grabbed two mics and mikelangelo, an amazing mulit-instrumentalist who had MC'd our show (and fronts an amazing band, i'l give you the link below), took to the drums. we just free-formed and got totally into it, jumping around on stage and acting like complete clowns until i knocked my front left tooth out with my microphone in a moment of over-enthusiastic mouth-drums. it (well, a piece of it) landed on my tongue and while reggie kept the bass going (and mikaelangelo didn't miss a beat) i explained my situation to the crowd, handed my tooth to larisa, the gorgeous promoter in the front row (asking her to pleeeease keep it in this glass of water...cos....i might need it) and kept on singing. i'm not sure if it was the impact of the microphone itself that did it, i've certainly been whacking my teeth against the damn mic for years now, maybe it was just fractured....ready to go and wanted to wait for the right show. not to mention i use my teeth to open everything from beers and bottled water to bags of crisps (uk) and fedex packages and basically anything else that my impatient little mits can't tear open in under 2.5 seconds. i may never know. but the tooth wasn't even fully real to begin with. in true amanda fashion, i've knocked it out 5 times now starting with:
1 - age 7, ran down fiske elemantry schjool hallway in wet snowboots, slipped and face-planted. this was the original break
2 - age 10, was chewing feverishly on a tunafish sandwich when it gave way again. not so dramatic
3 - age 12, hit it on the pool-bottom while doing a backflip underwater in the lexington recreation center. i was probably showing off
4 - age 19, lost it in a clearly humilating make-out session with mike ouyang, with whom i was drunkenly snogging on an armchair at a college house party. he was rather taken aback and (perhaps wisely) we never made it to second base
5 - age 30 - beatboxing with reggie watts, hit with beta 58 microphone
if i view this as a kind of an ongoing life/status chart, i think i'm doing fine, making progress.
back to the night, i ignored the jagged gaping tooth-hole and we followed the beatbox numebr with reggie's magic "what about blow jobs?" song - a heart-wrenching 80's ballad in c minor ("What about blow jobs?/In the middle of a dark and stormy night?"), me on piano and impromptu back-ups and mikelangelo still doing drums. it was an epic rendition. i fell off stage, and started blearily wondering how i was going to fix my tooth, when larisa announced that she had found a dentist in the audience. what? there were only 60 people in the whole dark noisy club. she grabbed him. enter chris cunningham, the senior community dentist at Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust, had come along with his son sam, a 19-year old scottish lad. they were both fans. i love our fucking band. i love our band so much. they had seen the spiegeltent show and wandered over to the after-party to see what was happening. chris had the next day free, and he offered to fix my gaping tooth-hole, pro bono. i almost cried. i felt all covered in tired universe band love. i had to sleep. we set a time over the din of dance music and i grabbed our fine friend max melton, (who needed a crash space - and i'd offered the floor) and we went in search of a cab home. i was barely conscious. it took us half an hour to find one and by the time we got to the apartment, i could barely make it up the stairs. i didn't have keys, brian had them, and he had left for home hours before.
we reached the fourth floor landing of the apartment only to find brian passed out, using his backpack as a pillow, in front of the (locked) apartment door. he'd been there for three hours. he didn't have the key. much ironic laughter was heard. we called emily in despair to see if SHE had them, and she managed to bribe psycho dave to cab it over and let us in. it took another half hour. i collapsed into bed at 5 a.m., toothless, phoneless, lifeless....but actually feeling quite content.
so here:
1 - have i actually grown up? this may never happen
2 - is it time to throw everything i own into the nearest body of water and live in the woods,
until such point when i learn to fend for myself or get eaten by a bear?
i'll leave the other musings i want to muse on for later but fill you in on the latest news & gossip, in no particular order.
1 - we went to see muse (great live, but i was zonked) in edinburgh right before leaving. amazing piano player, that guy is.
2 - my chemical romance opened and i met the singer, gerard way, who has been a really vocal fan of the dolls. he was a sweetheart and we talked for a while about music and music and touring then watched muse together...from behind a glass security window. seeing their life reminded me of being on tour with panic, though...their inability to go out because fans will maul you still seems scary to me. mental note to you: if we do get famous, please don't maul us. what a terrible problem to have at a rock show.
3 - leeds was good but not fantastic and the kaiser chiefs song went over very well with the local punters. sometimes i wish we played dance music.
4 - mr ben folds and i have been writing and plotting and it looks like we're going to join him on stage in aussie for a few of his symphony orchestra shows (for now, brisbane and melbourne, but its not confirmed). he's awesome.
5 - i ordered a new blackberry from the states and as of today, have fully resumed sucking on the electronic teat. yum!!! i have decided, however, that my emailing habit is out of control. i have admitted i have a "problem". we'll see what happens next. my fantasy is to try to go a solid month of 2007 email free, once we get off the road
6 - speaking of which, we're FINALLY TAKING A FUCKING BREAK from this madness, it's official. starting in january, once the play in boston is over, we're taking about five months off from touring so i can live, write, do some solo work and hopefully magically turn back into a Full-Functioning Human Being with Real Friends and Relationships, just like they have on the TV. joy!!!!!!!! rapture!!!!!!!
7 - my tooth is now repaired care of the Most Amazing Dentist in Scotland, who treated me like family in his little office. sam came along and we hung out and chatted it up and hit it off. i want to adopt them. chris put on his favorite Nick Drake CD while he drilled my tooth away and put on a nice new one. sam told me about drama school. we ate italian and chris and i discovered our shared love of bill bryson and john irving. we got sam a ticket to the leeds festival. when i come back to edinburgh (all of next august, if all goes according to plan), i'm moving in with them, if there's room in their garage.
8 - avril got married. did you SEE the wedding pictures? WTF, avril.
9- before i lose my mind and keep going, one more thing...we are touring with the most incredible band from australia in the USofA this october (and in aussie, coming right up).....and you should all educate yourselves and prepare to be blown away: www.theredpaintings.com. they are looking for live painters and human canvasses for the shows. email them. all tour dates are up at www.dresdendolls.com/calendar as usual.
and now, more links....
1 - reggie watts. my new musical hero: www.reggiewatts.com
2 - mikelangelo and the black sea gentlemen. nick cave meets cabaret. go, go go!:
www.oninvisiblewings.com/bsg/black_sea_01.html
3 - www.beyondhollywood.com/gallery/avril-lavigne-wedding-pictures/
love
a
we were home for about a week, and we've been back out on this european tour for about a week. it's an odd one, we have no bus. we're a crew of just 4, brian and me and emily and our wonderful sound-man psycho-dave, hopping from european city to european festival in planes and trains and automobiles and it's incredibly uncomfortable and disorienting. there is not only no home routine, there is no road routine, there is just chaos every day. my inner rainman is really bitching. one day in germany, next day in belgium, then next day england, next in germany, next in england. i've stopped noticing.
anyway.
i used to be REALLY bad about losing and breaking shit. beyond. i couldn't keep a set of keys or a wallet for more than a year and every item of clothing, body part, family heirloom and any other possibly portable-outside-of-my-home (and even indoors, things weren't necessarily safe) was invariably broken, lost, sprained, stained or otherwise mangled in my careless, billion-mile-an-hour clutches. at a certain point i realized that instead of adjusting my habits, which seemed impossible, i would simply adjust my sensitive attitude towards myself and my belongings and realize that they were simply fleeting, earthbased baubles, meant to be broken and lost ANYWAY in the great churning of cosmos movement (ohh and maybe i was just some cosmic helper, not only part of the universal puzzle but there to speed up the process of things!....oh!! special! special!! charming!) and fuck it let it break and let it get lost. i dun carrrre.
this may have started to be a decent solution for own collection of earthly goods and mortal coil, but it didn't make me many intimate friends as i was likely to break them. there was a time when i was about 22 when i remember absolutely Freaking Out. i had been living in my little harvard square sublet, street performing and working at toscanini's (the awesome ice cream & coffee shop) and basically living bohemian paradise before moving back to germany on my fully accidental graduate student scholarship. it was the day that i lost my wallet, my keys AND left the water running over a crate of strawberries in the kitchen sink for a full few hours until it hit me (one mile away) that things were getting out of control. i wondered if there was some kind of medication you could take for flakiness. i could go on and on about how i've left my wallet in my refridgerator, slept through my finals, accidentally brushed my teeth with shampoo, fallen over a 12-foot balcony, gone to the emergency room for drop-kicking a cactus which permeated my thick german army boots giving me possible tetanus, drank myself into a blackout in belgium and woken up naked and penniless in a strange....i'll stop there. you name it, if it was stupid, i've done it. i need to spare my mother the details. hi mom. i know you're reading this.
it wasn't too long after that i discovered sitting zen and started slowing my shit the fuck down, even a little bit, and i think i've made progress. i even fold my clothes out of the laundry (once or twice a year) and have started folding my clothes when i pack for tour (they do not stay that way after first unpacking). i try to make lists. i try to take deep breaths. i try to clean as i go. it is not at all natural. but it does feel amazing when it happens. i started wondering what it was that made this way, unlike some Other People that i knew who were clean, organized, dependable and otherwise upstanding compared to my overwhelming (but charming!) haphazardness.
i developed the theory a few years ago that i had, at one point in my warped life, decided that cleanliness and dependability were the polar opposite of freedom and independence and must therefor be avoided at all costs. this is, obviously, complete bullshit. the total freedom to make a complete fucking mess of my apartment as i write, compose, sort, correspond, paste and create is one of the things i hold dear. but it took me years to realize that i could create much more effectively with a clean space. the problem NOW is that it seems i reallly have to choose between one and the other. my space is never dirty so much as it is cluttered; lists and piles and unpacked packages and clothes tower in my room from the dawn til dusk and i usually start any given day with the cheerful optimism that i can spend the afternoon attacking the piles and then retire into an evening of artmaking. but i can't make art if the piles are there. so i work on the piles until 3 in the morning, fall into bed exhausted but feeling rather satisfied that, because i've made so much progress, tomorrow will be different. it's never true. i wake up to 74 emails, a load of complicated problems, more CDs from tour that i uncover, there's always something. i am unable to clear my mind. it stays perpetually cluttered. i think this is one of the essential keys to unlocking the mystery of Why I Cannot Write On The Road. things at home are hard enough, and when i start traveling my brain can barely keep up with the amount of daily to-do shit and stimulus that any creative output starts to seem like a distant dream. things come in, but don't come together. things come together when the table is clear, when i feel like my brain doesn't have mundane things to do. i've gotten to the point in my life where i feel like an "adult" because i am taking care of my "responsibilities" and the cost seems to have been the part of me that is an artist. self-fulfilling prophecy? probably. i thought that getting a team of managers would solve this problem but instead, because of the amount of shit involved with running a band, i spend more time keeping track of what people have and haven't actually taken care of. shit, i digressed.
-
it's 24 hours later but i must finish story......so. we came back on tour, played a few festival shows, and went to edinburgh for a few days off. i wanted to be at the fringe festival. i had wanted to be there for an entire month, but three days, with a show in the middle, was all i got. it was better than nothing, i fell into the fringe like a fucking junkie diving headfirst into a hefty-sized bag of dope...just walking down the street during the fringe is like paradise to me....theater everywhere, street performers everywhere, music everywhere. home. paradise. i found reggie watts, an amazing hip-hop/spoken word artist/singer/comedian and we spent the majority of the fringe hanging out and going to shows and generally making each other laugh. i took regina and her right-on russian mom over to his show (after hers, which was brilliant as always) and she loved him. everything felt good. even though i'd pulled my fucking neck out and spent every morning at the chiropractor. i turned my computer off and at this moment have an automatic message answering that i have vacated the planet and have over 450 mails to answer, post-spam. i don't care.
the second night, i was kicking it at the spiegel garden outside the fabulous famous spiegeltent, a portable wood-and-glass circus venue i've been in love with since i first laid eyes on it back in melbourne a few years ago, and a general meeting spot for actors and fringe folks til late late at night. i was moving too fast, trying to meet up with one person and another, and rushed off to use the bathroom (they have these trailer port-a-bathrooms off stationed there all month) and there was a line of five or six women waiting for the female toilet (as they call it in britain). there was nobody in the line for the men's. i went for the men's, out of habit. years of travel have made me impervious to such distinctions, but i do still take pains to look as gay boy as possible when walking into a men's room. i was wearing a freakish outfit (and i was at the fringe, for god's sake, where everybody's a fucking actor in a post-modern performance art piece anyway) so i figured i was fine. i got a few raised eyebrows from my friends at the urinals. warning: the following scene is about to become uncomfortably graphic. so i went into a stall, shuffling and huffing and covered with backpack and fanny pack (don't say that in the UK, they laugh their heads off at you because it translates to "vagina pack") and drink in hand and realized that i had to change my tampon. i usually use the sponge, but i was out of sponges, and i usually use applicator-less tampons, but i had left those at home in a packing snafu and so i was left with the box of super-absorbant tampax that i bought that day at the convenient store. i grabbed the box out of my backpack and ripped one open, whereupon it promptly fell on the floor of the stall and rolled neatly under the divider and into the well-polished shoe of a man at the urinal directly to my left. i made an attempt at retrieval while trying to utter a "he he why isn't this just delightfully funny" little chortle but my grabbing hands pushed mr. tampon further out of sight and at that moment i was distracted by my ringing phone (my blackberry, to be precise, or crackberry (as they call it in new york, or blackmailer, as they call it over here). my ringing phone was Fabian from future cinema, i was supposed to have a business meeting with him and we'd arranged he would call me when he got to the area. it felt urgent. we'd been trying to meet all day and night, and i didn't want to think i was blowing him off. i suppose i could have patiently ignored the call (ass on toilet seat, tampon-debacle in full swing) and waited for a calmer time, but noooo, i answered it. however, as i went to answer it i also realized that my Somewhat Feminine voice would give away my stall ruse, so i answered with a deep " Hullo" that was, uh, the best impresison of a man i could muster at the moment. only about two sentences were exchanged while i tried to gather my self, my wits and my tampax and as i rose from the throne, mid-conversation, my phone slipped out from between my ear and my neck. it was one of those beautifully cinematic slow-motion movements where my face contorts into a silent "NNNNNNOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" as i spin, looking toilet-ward, in just enough time to see it splash all swan-lake- like into the murky blue pond of port-a-john. this was a flushable port-a-john, so there was nobody else's piss to contend with but my own, and my hand instinctively shot into the murk to try to slavage my two-hundred dollar device (and, if possible, my business meeting). no suck fucking luck, it was frantically vibrating with a blank screen and i heard that electronic death toll ring.
the rest of the night was a wash (no pun intended) and i went home to email fabian that, though it sounded like the lamest excuse in the world, i had indeed dropped my toilet in the phone during our conversation and could we possibly re-schedule our appointment for tomorrow evening? i thought i heard you taking a piss, he said. my god, is it always that obvious? i do it all the time, does that mean EVERYBODY knows? at least i know now. i glumly attempted to remove all moving phone parts and covers and batteries and sim cards, letting them air out in the clear scottish breeze, but to no avail. the phone stayed dead and i found myself giving myself that familiar old lashing. stupid stupid girl!!! what are you thinking, using mens bathrooms and changing your tampax and disguising your voice for important business meetings all at the same time. BAD!!! grow up.
as my friend asked when i told his this story: ah, pretty telling. are you TRYING to flush your life away? this was food for thought.
perhaps. yeah. maybe. so??
things went from bad to worse the next night, when i decided that playing a THIRD show, after our spiegeltent show (relatively awesome) and future cinema event (also awesome - these people created a MAGIC fucking space in a building based on the original nosferatu...). brian went back to our communally rented apartment to hit the sack and i met up with reggie watts at the bongo club for the after-after party. we didn't have any songs planned, but we';d been beat-boxing on the street the day before and it sounded pretty good (well, HE sounded pretty good, he's reggie watts....i sounded like a white girl punk cabaret singer with a torn-up voice trying to beat-box...but, you know, charming!!!) so we grabbed two mics and mikelangelo, an amazing mulit-instrumentalist who had MC'd our show (and fronts an amazing band, i'l give you the link below), took to the drums. we just free-formed and got totally into it, jumping around on stage and acting like complete clowns until i knocked my front left tooth out with my microphone in a moment of over-enthusiastic mouth-drums. it (well, a piece of it) landed on my tongue and while reggie kept the bass going (and mikaelangelo didn't miss a beat) i explained my situation to the crowd, handed my tooth to larisa, the gorgeous promoter in the front row (asking her to pleeeease keep it in this glass of water...cos....i might need it) and kept on singing. i'm not sure if it was the impact of the microphone itself that did it, i've certainly been whacking my teeth against the damn mic for years now, maybe it was just fractured....ready to go and wanted to wait for the right show. not to mention i use my teeth to open everything from beers and bottled water to bags of crisps (uk) and fedex packages and basically anything else that my impatient little mits can't tear open in under 2.5 seconds. i may never know. but the tooth wasn't even fully real to begin with. in true amanda fashion, i've knocked it out 5 times now starting with:
1 - age 7, ran down fiske elemantry schjool hallway in wet snowboots, slipped and face-planted. this was the original break
2 - age 10, was chewing feverishly on a tunafish sandwich when it gave way again. not so dramatic
3 - age 12, hit it on the pool-bottom while doing a backflip underwater in the lexington recreation center. i was probably showing off
4 - age 19, lost it in a clearly humilating make-out session with mike ouyang, with whom i was drunkenly snogging on an armchair at a college house party. he was rather taken aback and (perhaps wisely) we never made it to second base
5 - age 30 - beatboxing with reggie watts, hit with beta 58 microphone
if i view this as a kind of an ongoing life/status chart, i think i'm doing fine, making progress.
back to the night, i ignored the jagged gaping tooth-hole and we followed the beatbox numebr with reggie's magic "what about blow jobs?" song - a heart-wrenching 80's ballad in c minor ("What about blow jobs?/In the middle of a dark and stormy night?"), me on piano and impromptu back-ups and mikelangelo still doing drums. it was an epic rendition. i fell off stage, and started blearily wondering how i was going to fix my tooth, when larisa announced that she had found a dentist in the audience. what? there were only 60 people in the whole dark noisy club. she grabbed him. enter chris cunningham, the senior community dentist at Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust, had come along with his son sam, a 19-year old scottish lad. they were both fans. i love our fucking band. i love our band so much. they had seen the spiegeltent show and wandered over to the after-party to see what was happening. chris had the next day free, and he offered to fix my gaping tooth-hole, pro bono. i almost cried. i felt all covered in tired universe band love. i had to sleep. we set a time over the din of dance music and i grabbed our fine friend max melton, (who needed a crash space - and i'd offered the floor) and we went in search of a cab home. i was barely conscious. it took us half an hour to find one and by the time we got to the apartment, i could barely make it up the stairs. i didn't have keys, brian had them, and he had left for home hours before.
we reached the fourth floor landing of the apartment only to find brian passed out, using his backpack as a pillow, in front of the (locked) apartment door. he'd been there for three hours. he didn't have the key. much ironic laughter was heard. we called emily in despair to see if SHE had them, and she managed to bribe psycho dave to cab it over and let us in. it took another half hour. i collapsed into bed at 5 a.m., toothless, phoneless, lifeless....but actually feeling quite content.
so here:
1 - have i actually grown up? this may never happen
2 - is it time to throw everything i own into the nearest body of water and live in the woods,
until such point when i learn to fend for myself or get eaten by a bear?
i'll leave the other musings i want to muse on for later but fill you in on the latest news & gossip, in no particular order.
1 - we went to see muse (great live, but i was zonked) in edinburgh right before leaving. amazing piano player, that guy is.
2 - my chemical romance opened and i met the singer, gerard way, who has been a really vocal fan of the dolls. he was a sweetheart and we talked for a while about music and music and touring then watched muse together...from behind a glass security window. seeing their life reminded me of being on tour with panic, though...their inability to go out because fans will maul you still seems scary to me. mental note to you: if we do get famous, please don't maul us. what a terrible problem to have at a rock show.
3 - leeds was good but not fantastic and the kaiser chiefs song went over very well with the local punters. sometimes i wish we played dance music.
4 - mr ben folds and i have been writing and plotting and it looks like we're going to join him on stage in aussie for a few of his symphony orchestra shows (for now, brisbane and melbourne, but its not confirmed). he's awesome.
5 - i ordered a new blackberry from the states and as of today, have fully resumed sucking on the electronic teat. yum!!! i have decided, however, that my emailing habit is out of control. i have admitted i have a "problem". we'll see what happens next. my fantasy is to try to go a solid month of 2007 email free, once we get off the road
6 - speaking of which, we're FINALLY TAKING A FUCKING BREAK from this madness, it's official. starting in january, once the play in boston is over, we're taking about five months off from touring so i can live, write, do some solo work and hopefully magically turn back into a Full-Functioning Human Being with Real Friends and Relationships, just like they have on the TV. joy!!!!!!!! rapture!!!!!!!
7 - my tooth is now repaired care of the Most Amazing Dentist in Scotland, who treated me like family in his little office. sam came along and we hung out and chatted it up and hit it off. i want to adopt them. chris put on his favorite Nick Drake CD while he drilled my tooth away and put on a nice new one. sam told me about drama school. we ate italian and chris and i discovered our shared love of bill bryson and john irving. we got sam a ticket to the leeds festival. when i come back to edinburgh (all of next august, if all goes according to plan), i'm moving in with them, if there's room in their garage.
8 - avril got married. did you SEE the wedding pictures? WTF, avril.
9- before i lose my mind and keep going, one more thing...we are touring with the most incredible band from australia in the USofA this october (and in aussie, coming right up).....and you should all educate yourselves and prepare to be blown away: www.theredpaintings.com. they are looking for live painters and human canvasses for the shows. email them. all tour dates are up at www.dresdendolls.com/calendar as usual.
and now, more links....
1 - reggie watts. my new musical hero: www.reggiewatts.com
2 - mikelangelo and the black sea gentlemen. nick cave meets cabaret. go, go go!:
www.oninvisiblewings.com/bsg/black_sea_01.html
3 - www.beyondhollywood.com/gallery/avril-lavigne-wedding-pictures/
love
a
Thursday, August 10, 2006
imagine all the panic (!)
my body is heaving a kind of relief that it's never known before.
it's so hard to relate to anyone, even those who know me well, the combination of good and bad and evil i've been whizzing through in the past five weeks. one minute, playing in front of vapid mallrats who are alternately ignoring us and screaming at us. seeing the look in brian's face (he is, in my humble opinion, one of the top drummers of the century) after kids scream at him "YOU SUCK!!!!" after his heartwrenching drum solos. dressing rooms with no food, and sometimes no water, fluorescent lights, no trees, no quiet, no soundchecks, the haze of nothing to do in the middle of giant parking lots that stretch as far as the eye can see. squeeeeeeeling fourteen-year-old girls hanging around the tour buses all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of a panic member. trying to relate to the boys in the band, mostly not getting anywhere. the bus starting to feel like a cage.
the next minute, getting in a cab for Fuck The Back Row, into the arms of our fans, watching our little world growing slowly, as it does, step by step, friend through friend, word by mouth. being so exhausted i can barely stand. feeling the realness of a makeshift vaudeville theater dressing room instead of a corporate cubicle, laughing with the drag queens, watching all the beautiful art that people are making and bringing, wanting to spend more time with every person i meet, not wanting to go back to the bus. ever. feeling the difference between being on stage in front of three hundred people listening, slowly, versus being on stage in front of 3000 people chewing gum, blinking wildly and texting.
and mostly, moving too fast to feel anything. seriously. emotions just shutting down and assuming they'll have time to manifest at some later date.
the panic tour did have it's bright spots. the boys themselves continued to be gentlemen and sweethearts, and i got to know ryan (the guitarist and songwriter that i had over to the cloud club, see last long blog) a little better. i felt like i had something, anything, in common with him....he has an artist's head, i said, he thinks in lyrics, he likes to wear wild make-up (but had never heard of adam ant?? i tried to rectify and gave him an adam ant mix, but who knows if that'll do any good)...he must be from a similar planet. he grew on me. we sat down one night after a particularly harrowing show and i decided we'd fight fire with fire and start covering "imagine" by john lennon. so what do you think, when all this is going on? you've sold a million records, the girls scream your name....what the fuck is happening in your head? what's going on? we talked about wsriting on the road, how it's impossible. how there's no mental space to get to the place where you can possibly articulate an idea. he looked at me and told me that he'd never talked to another artist about this before. there's not that many of us, you know. you're writing this, performing that, whatever. the struggles are the same. i close my eyes, i see myself in the same way. i wish i had someone to talk to who has been through the same thing. maybe ben folds will call up randomly.
ryan learned "imagine" and we played it on stage with us the next night, and instead of people throwing water bottles at us, i think they were just really confused. i was hoping for water bottles. you win some, you lose some. at any rate, any irony was lost. note to self: this crowd doesn't yet "get" the irony thing. was it their age or their parents? brian and i would discuss this. will they learn to appreciate irony, at some later date? the answer at the end of the night was a pretty firm "no fucking way". a lot of these kids were attending a concert for the first time. for many it was the second. their first concert? the polls revealed: britney spears. i'm dead serious. so we covered "hit me baby" nightly as well, with brendon from panic on vocal. irony lost, but what good fun!! if the tour had continued, we were going to work on "living on a prayer". we tried to have fun. we did what we do. take lemons, make lemonade. take situation, make art.
two years ago, when we were touring europe and i was at my wits end, thinking that the band was going to break up, thinking that it was all over and that brian and I had had enough of each other for good, i found a bright spot in listening to avril lavigne's new record and deciding to make a fake video out of the song "together". you've seen the results (if you haven't: www.dresdendolls.com/music/karaoke/index.htm). it was truly cathartic. i don't think anyone really believes me when i say that. having a project like that to throw myself into saved me. the song, with all it's adolescent cheese and overproduction, gave me a wormhole back to 15-year-old self, the lonely confused one eating her lunch in the piano practice room.
this tour felt the same way. brian and i were getting along fine. we were bonded through our vehement frustration of a common enemy, the panic fans. we went out on stage every night ready for battle. but i turned to myself for a solution, and i foudn it in this: why not make a video with these guys? they're here, they're bored like we are, they're hilarious. so we did. we decided to film a home-movie video of the two bands trying to kill each other, spy vs. spy style, and the results will be forthcoming. they were all excellent actors. the label nitpicked us until we couldn't handle it anymore and the deal was broken. we aren't making a "real" video for our next single. backstabber. what's more real than this?, we keep asking. nothing.
a week before the tour ended, we got the call in seattle that ryan's dad had suddenly died. his only close family. he was an only child and his mom was out of the picture. our hearts sank, we sat in the bus and all looked at each other at a loss for words.
they canceled two shows. we almost didn't want to get the call that the shows were on, because we assumed that that would mean that ryan had been talked into coming back on tour when he should be at home, dealing. dealing with who, with what? ryan came back on tour after three days off, we finished up in california. the whole crew felt strange, their whole gang seemed out of sorts. no wonder. i took a long walk with ryan around the parking lot in anaheim. i felt like the whole world had been thrown at him, in all it's shitty ugliness, and what could i say? better to say nothing. we walked, saying nothing and occasionally something. we started at the hooters billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. we waled to the bud light billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. do you have anyone real to talk to? i will. i'll talk to you. when you're ready. don't lose me. i'm an ally. really. i hugged him and i went back to the bus, getting into my bunk with a heaviness i couldn't describe.
................
back in my apartment, i face the classic bullshit of myself and my expectations of myself. ben folds called last night. he emailed a week ago, raving about our records and asking if we would share the stage with him at the sydney opera house when we're down there in a few weeks. we attached like long lost siblings, the same sense of self-what, the same instrument hanging us up by it's strings. we talked for two hours, ranting and raving and laughing with each other about this treadmill of sings and recordings and touring that we've been on. he's an ally. he was in tomorrow, in adelaide. i was in today, in boston.
i wander into my bathroom and look at myself naked in the mirror. not bad, i say. you're fine. go to bed.
i put on my kimono, pretend to be romantic, sit down at my computer, pour an apple martini and read the short story one my best friends sent me weeks ago, i havent had time to read it on the road with all the mental clutter. i close my eyes halfway through, drag my finger along the frame of the screen which is warm and silver, and think to myself: now, enjoy yourself. it's quick. it's over so quickly.
.....................
every time i come home i feel the same stressful triptych, quadrupltych, of feelings and prioritues all in conflict with each other. be with your people. move forward, write music and make things. catch up and stay on top of managing the band. rest. amanda. the night i got back i went out with pope and the house and we drank and smoked cigarettes until i came tumbling into my apartment with becca. i threw on one of my favorite king missile discs and sang at the top of my lungs to "as i walked through queens". i still miss listening to music. i can't do it on tour. then we lip-synched together, creating impromptu videos to the entirety of "under my skin". thank god she knew most of the lyrics. becca had made a july mix for me and we listened to it but i was unable to pull myself away from the piano, playing along with every chord to every song by razorlight, the eels, the french kicks, and rilo kiley. becca! you're too hip for your own good. they're just chords!!! she can play piano the way i can't, i've seen her sitting at the piano and reading music. show-off. she was in drunken awe of my ability to sit and play chords by ear. we'll trade, i said. someday.
.....................
the sheet music book is finally out, it's released about two weeks into the tour and my mother emails. she's upset. she feels like i painted a not-so-flattering picture of her, my step-father and the beloved steinway i grew up on.
my mother was like any mother. how can i say this? i love her. but i saw her as a constant artistic obstacle as i was growing up. how could it be any other way? she gave birth to me, carried me in her womb for nine months. the buddha once said (i paraphrase) "we can carry our parents on our backs for our entire lives and never repay the debt". i feel the same way. my mother and my step-father gave me all the tools, for better or worse, that made everything possible. i love them more than i can possibly ever articulate. the teenager in me will always scream in defiance. but i've seen the alternative, and they're not on the dark side. they're on the side of the force. and for that, i will be eternally indebted. my mother brought me to music. she fed me music, by making me sing, even when i didn't want to. and it was that action that solidified the performer in me. mom, i know you're reading this. i love you. thank you.
.........................
today i woke up at one o'clock in the afternoon and went straight out to shoot filler for our homemade video with pope and brian. we went over to the steinway dealership in boston to shoot some footage of brian trying to heave a grand piano out of the window (onto, poetically, ryan's head). the guy who worked there offered to show us a secret, if we came back at 6. we went and shot on the beach, then went back, burning with curiosity. he let us in, the staff were gone. underneath the steinway store on boylston street, two stories undergroung, is the first concert hall in boston. it's decrepit, water-damaged and pink, and utterly beautiful. filled with dead pianos and filing cabinets, and seated about four hundred in it's day, including the balcony. poe and brian and i (and brianna and julian, who came along for the trip) wandered through it....doors leading into blackness, the floorboards ready to give out into the 6th circle of hell, mozart and beethoven and schubert all embalmed in the script at the top of the walls...and at the end of the theater, a little stage the size of a flatbed truck. why was the stage so small, i asked. piano concert hall, he answered, no need for more space. i know where we're doing our next photoshoot.
.................
two drops of peppermint oil in a bottle of water is fucking excellent. a massage thearpist showed me the way.
.................
i only have another six days at home. i want to make love to my tea kettle, i want to go to the museum of science and see the bodies exhibit. i want to drink apple martinis and smoke cigarettes and read books by bill bryson. but i feel like i should learn a new german song for our upcoming tour, finish the ideas that are in my head for songs that planted themselves there on the road, deal with the business of life and keep my interview appointments, clean the closet, take my boots in for repair. who will fucking tell me what to do? i need someone to tell me what my priorites are, because i sure as hell don't know. i want to go back to harvard square and stand there, painted white, for strangers to see. i bought my cambridge street perfomers' permit, on a whim, the last time i was home. maybe i will. i miss myself.
.................
i buy thom yorke's new solo album, the eraser. and read his interview in spin magazine.
"so, mr. yorke, you seem upset about the fact that the world is ending, that we're all about to die in a glorious combustion of greed and selfishness."
"yes."
ha!
i light another cigarette and keep typing.
...................
while on tour, i listen incessantly to the kaiser chiefs' record. it's excellent workout music. especially on the elliptical machine.
i light another cigarette.
...................
it's so hard to relate to anyone, even those who know me well, the combination of good and bad and evil i've been whizzing through in the past five weeks. one minute, playing in front of vapid mallrats who are alternately ignoring us and screaming at us. seeing the look in brian's face (he is, in my humble opinion, one of the top drummers of the century) after kids scream at him "YOU SUCK!!!!" after his heartwrenching drum solos. dressing rooms with no food, and sometimes no water, fluorescent lights, no trees, no quiet, no soundchecks, the haze of nothing to do in the middle of giant parking lots that stretch as far as the eye can see. squeeeeeeeling fourteen-year-old girls hanging around the tour buses all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of a panic member. trying to relate to the boys in the band, mostly not getting anywhere. the bus starting to feel like a cage.
the next minute, getting in a cab for Fuck The Back Row, into the arms of our fans, watching our little world growing slowly, as it does, step by step, friend through friend, word by mouth. being so exhausted i can barely stand. feeling the realness of a makeshift vaudeville theater dressing room instead of a corporate cubicle, laughing with the drag queens, watching all the beautiful art that people are making and bringing, wanting to spend more time with every person i meet, not wanting to go back to the bus. ever. feeling the difference between being on stage in front of three hundred people listening, slowly, versus being on stage in front of 3000 people chewing gum, blinking wildly and texting.
and mostly, moving too fast to feel anything. seriously. emotions just shutting down and assuming they'll have time to manifest at some later date.
the panic tour did have it's bright spots. the boys themselves continued to be gentlemen and sweethearts, and i got to know ryan (the guitarist and songwriter that i had over to the cloud club, see last long blog) a little better. i felt like i had something, anything, in common with him....he has an artist's head, i said, he thinks in lyrics, he likes to wear wild make-up (but had never heard of adam ant?? i tried to rectify and gave him an adam ant mix, but who knows if that'll do any good)...he must be from a similar planet. he grew on me. we sat down one night after a particularly harrowing show and i decided we'd fight fire with fire and start covering "imagine" by john lennon. so what do you think, when all this is going on? you've sold a million records, the girls scream your name....what the fuck is happening in your head? what's going on? we talked about wsriting on the road, how it's impossible. how there's no mental space to get to the place where you can possibly articulate an idea. he looked at me and told me that he'd never talked to another artist about this before. there's not that many of us, you know. you're writing this, performing that, whatever. the struggles are the same. i close my eyes, i see myself in the same way. i wish i had someone to talk to who has been through the same thing. maybe ben folds will call up randomly.
ryan learned "imagine" and we played it on stage with us the next night, and instead of people throwing water bottles at us, i think they were just really confused. i was hoping for water bottles. you win some, you lose some. at any rate, any irony was lost. note to self: this crowd doesn't yet "get" the irony thing. was it their age or their parents? brian and i would discuss this. will they learn to appreciate irony, at some later date? the answer at the end of the night was a pretty firm "no fucking way". a lot of these kids were attending a concert for the first time. for many it was the second. their first concert? the polls revealed: britney spears. i'm dead serious. so we covered "hit me baby" nightly as well, with brendon from panic on vocal. irony lost, but what good fun!! if the tour had continued, we were going to work on "living on a prayer". we tried to have fun. we did what we do. take lemons, make lemonade. take situation, make art.
two years ago, when we were touring europe and i was at my wits end, thinking that the band was going to break up, thinking that it was all over and that brian and I had had enough of each other for good, i found a bright spot in listening to avril lavigne's new record and deciding to make a fake video out of the song "together". you've seen the results (if you haven't: www.dresdendolls.com/music/karaoke/index.htm). it was truly cathartic. i don't think anyone really believes me when i say that. having a project like that to throw myself into saved me. the song, with all it's adolescent cheese and overproduction, gave me a wormhole back to 15-year-old self, the lonely confused one eating her lunch in the piano practice room.
this tour felt the same way. brian and i were getting along fine. we were bonded through our vehement frustration of a common enemy, the panic fans. we went out on stage every night ready for battle. but i turned to myself for a solution, and i foudn it in this: why not make a video with these guys? they're here, they're bored like we are, they're hilarious. so we did. we decided to film a home-movie video of the two bands trying to kill each other, spy vs. spy style, and the results will be forthcoming. they were all excellent actors. the label nitpicked us until we couldn't handle it anymore and the deal was broken. we aren't making a "real" video for our next single. backstabber. what's more real than this?, we keep asking. nothing.
a week before the tour ended, we got the call in seattle that ryan's dad had suddenly died. his only close family. he was an only child and his mom was out of the picture. our hearts sank, we sat in the bus and all looked at each other at a loss for words.
they canceled two shows. we almost didn't want to get the call that the shows were on, because we assumed that that would mean that ryan had been talked into coming back on tour when he should be at home, dealing. dealing with who, with what? ryan came back on tour after three days off, we finished up in california. the whole crew felt strange, their whole gang seemed out of sorts. no wonder. i took a long walk with ryan around the parking lot in anaheim. i felt like the whole world had been thrown at him, in all it's shitty ugliness, and what could i say? better to say nothing. we walked, saying nothing and occasionally something. we started at the hooters billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. we waled to the bud light billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. do you have anyone real to talk to? i will. i'll talk to you. when you're ready. don't lose me. i'm an ally. really. i hugged him and i went back to the bus, getting into my bunk with a heaviness i couldn't describe.
................
back in my apartment, i face the classic bullshit of myself and my expectations of myself. ben folds called last night. he emailed a week ago, raving about our records and asking if we would share the stage with him at the sydney opera house when we're down there in a few weeks. we attached like long lost siblings, the same sense of self-what, the same instrument hanging us up by it's strings. we talked for two hours, ranting and raving and laughing with each other about this treadmill of sings and recordings and touring that we've been on. he's an ally. he was in tomorrow, in adelaide. i was in today, in boston.
i wander into my bathroom and look at myself naked in the mirror. not bad, i say. you're fine. go to bed.
i put on my kimono, pretend to be romantic, sit down at my computer, pour an apple martini and read the short story one my best friends sent me weeks ago, i havent had time to read it on the road with all the mental clutter. i close my eyes halfway through, drag my finger along the frame of the screen which is warm and silver, and think to myself: now, enjoy yourself. it's quick. it's over so quickly.
.....................
every time i come home i feel the same stressful triptych, quadrupltych, of feelings and prioritues all in conflict with each other. be with your people. move forward, write music and make things. catch up and stay on top of managing the band. rest. amanda. the night i got back i went out with pope and the house and we drank and smoked cigarettes until i came tumbling into my apartment with becca. i threw on one of my favorite king missile discs and sang at the top of my lungs to "as i walked through queens". i still miss listening to music. i can't do it on tour. then we lip-synched together, creating impromptu videos to the entirety of "under my skin". thank god she knew most of the lyrics. becca had made a july mix for me and we listened to it but i was unable to pull myself away from the piano, playing along with every chord to every song by razorlight, the eels, the french kicks, and rilo kiley. becca! you're too hip for your own good. they're just chords!!! she can play piano the way i can't, i've seen her sitting at the piano and reading music. show-off. she was in drunken awe of my ability to sit and play chords by ear. we'll trade, i said. someday.
.....................
the sheet music book is finally out, it's released about two weeks into the tour and my mother emails. she's upset. she feels like i painted a not-so-flattering picture of her, my step-father and the beloved steinway i grew up on.
my mother was like any mother. how can i say this? i love her. but i saw her as a constant artistic obstacle as i was growing up. how could it be any other way? she gave birth to me, carried me in her womb for nine months. the buddha once said (i paraphrase) "we can carry our parents on our backs for our entire lives and never repay the debt". i feel the same way. my mother and my step-father gave me all the tools, for better or worse, that made everything possible. i love them more than i can possibly ever articulate. the teenager in me will always scream in defiance. but i've seen the alternative, and they're not on the dark side. they're on the side of the force. and for that, i will be eternally indebted. my mother brought me to music. she fed me music, by making me sing, even when i didn't want to. and it was that action that solidified the performer in me. mom, i know you're reading this. i love you. thank you.
.........................
today i woke up at one o'clock in the afternoon and went straight out to shoot filler for our homemade video with pope and brian. we went over to the steinway dealership in boston to shoot some footage of brian trying to heave a grand piano out of the window (onto, poetically, ryan's head). the guy who worked there offered to show us a secret, if we came back at 6. we went and shot on the beach, then went back, burning with curiosity. he let us in, the staff were gone. underneath the steinway store on boylston street, two stories undergroung, is the first concert hall in boston. it's decrepit, water-damaged and pink, and utterly beautiful. filled with dead pianos and filing cabinets, and seated about four hundred in it's day, including the balcony. poe and brian and i (and brianna and julian, who came along for the trip) wandered through it....doors leading into blackness, the floorboards ready to give out into the 6th circle of hell, mozart and beethoven and schubert all embalmed in the script at the top of the walls...and at the end of the theater, a little stage the size of a flatbed truck. why was the stage so small, i asked. piano concert hall, he answered, no need for more space. i know where we're doing our next photoshoot.
.................
two drops of peppermint oil in a bottle of water is fucking excellent. a massage thearpist showed me the way.
.................
i only have another six days at home. i want to make love to my tea kettle, i want to go to the museum of science and see the bodies exhibit. i want to drink apple martinis and smoke cigarettes and read books by bill bryson. but i feel like i should learn a new german song for our upcoming tour, finish the ideas that are in my head for songs that planted themselves there on the road, deal with the business of life and keep my interview appointments, clean the closet, take my boots in for repair. who will fucking tell me what to do? i need someone to tell me what my priorites are, because i sure as hell don't know. i want to go back to harvard square and stand there, painted white, for strangers to see. i bought my cambridge street perfomers' permit, on a whim, the last time i was home. maybe i will. i miss myself.
.................
i buy thom yorke's new solo album, the eraser. and read his interview in spin magazine.
"so, mr. yorke, you seem upset about the fact that the world is ending, that we're all about to die in a glorious combustion of greed and selfishness."
"yes."
ha!
i light another cigarette and keep typing.
...................
while on tour, i listen incessantly to the kaiser chiefs' record. it's excellent workout music. especially on the elliptical machine.
i light another cigarette.
...................
Monday, July 10, 2006
haiku
i think i may start to blog purely in haiku
o! camera phone
nine billion megapixels
that they cannot feel
o! camera phone
nine billion megapixels
that they cannot feel
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
femming out
we left the panic tour for a one-off show in san jose...flew out to california and spent, literally, about 16 hours in the state.
the show was outdoors, and we were filled with immense happy joy joy to be invited onstage to play with the violent femmes. we sat in for about 4 songs, including "good feeling", "confessions"...they were so mellow and cool and the whole thing was like a little dose of music medicine for both of us. you couldn't wipe the grinsd off either of our faces....though gordon gano came back to my piano with a towel and bound my arms because i was so happy and banging away that i didn't realize i was stepping all over what was supposed to be a drum solo. hopefully somebody got some good pictures.
the land of contrast continues, back to the airport to come home to boston for another 16 hours, make love to my own bed, and get back on the bus. one good thing did happen: i invited the panic boys over to the cloud club since we were all in town at the same time and ryan, the shy and retiring lyricist, took me up on my offer. there was a raging party here the night before, so wading through the carnage and hungover vibe i showed him our magic house and we watched some ghetto impromptu fireworks from the roof. we had a wonderful time...the way it's supposed to be, everybody in the cloud club sitting around til late late, drinking and philosophizing about nothing important, michael pope in true michael pope form chain-smoking and entertaining us with his every utterance, becca talking about sleeping in the bathtub and wanting a pony, lee probing sweetly deep into all of pschyes and mother issues, noah and pope arguing about media, brianna soaking it all in with her beautiful wide eyes and agreeing with me (thanks brianna) that honesty is always the best policy when dealing with normal-people-relationship adultery. peter sand came by at about 1 am and showed us his vintage volkswagen cartruck (cruck? or trar?). things were still loud down on the stoop when i went to bed, in heaven under my own quilt. now it's morning, we leave for hampton beach in an hour and i won't see this paradise of home for another month. i wish i could beam myself back here every three days for just an hour. it's fuel for me. i think i am going to take this last hour, and instead of blogging like an idiot, ride my bike to the public garden and look at the ducks and get some edamame succotash at whole foods.
ach: some business before i forget. the songbook is OFFICIALLY FINISHED (aaaahhh!) and has been shipped.
you can order it here: www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls
only one snag: the DVD is still in production and is being shipped separately to everyone who ordered the book.
if you already received your copy and are wondering, it's on the way.
don't despair. i've already been getting fantastic feedback on the book, so hopefully the painful wait was worth it.
love & happy The Man Day
a
the show was outdoors, and we were filled with immense happy joy joy to be invited onstage to play with the violent femmes. we sat in for about 4 songs, including "good feeling", "confessions"...they were so mellow and cool and the whole thing was like a little dose of music medicine for both of us. you couldn't wipe the grinsd off either of our faces....though gordon gano came back to my piano with a towel and bound my arms because i was so happy and banging away that i didn't realize i was stepping all over what was supposed to be a drum solo. hopefully somebody got some good pictures.
the land of contrast continues, back to the airport to come home to boston for another 16 hours, make love to my own bed, and get back on the bus. one good thing did happen: i invited the panic boys over to the cloud club since we were all in town at the same time and ryan, the shy and retiring lyricist, took me up on my offer. there was a raging party here the night before, so wading through the carnage and hungover vibe i showed him our magic house and we watched some ghetto impromptu fireworks from the roof. we had a wonderful time...the way it's supposed to be, everybody in the cloud club sitting around til late late, drinking and philosophizing about nothing important, michael pope in true michael pope form chain-smoking and entertaining us with his every utterance, becca talking about sleeping in the bathtub and wanting a pony, lee probing sweetly deep into all of pschyes and mother issues, noah and pope arguing about media, brianna soaking it all in with her beautiful wide eyes and agreeing with me (thanks brianna) that honesty is always the best policy when dealing with normal-people-relationship adultery. peter sand came by at about 1 am and showed us his vintage volkswagen cartruck (cruck? or trar?). things were still loud down on the stoop when i went to bed, in heaven under my own quilt. now it's morning, we leave for hampton beach in an hour and i won't see this paradise of home for another month. i wish i could beam myself back here every three days for just an hour. it's fuel for me. i think i am going to take this last hour, and instead of blogging like an idiot, ride my bike to the public garden and look at the ducks and get some edamame succotash at whole foods.
ach: some business before i forget. the songbook is OFFICIALLY FINISHED (aaaahhh!) and has been shipped.
you can order it here: www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls
only one snag: the DVD is still in production and is being shipped separately to everyone who ordered the book.
if you already received your copy and are wondering, it's on the way.
don't despair. i've already been getting fantastic feedback on the book, so hopefully the painful wait was worth it.
love & happy The Man Day
a
Thursday, June 29, 2006
panic! at the mindfuck
..................................
three days ago
..................................
i'm on a plane on the way to washington DC, to start the panic at the disco tour. we'll be opening for a band i've never met, never talked to, and whose music i barely know. it should be interesting. and they're almost half my age. my god. it's sort of the flip side of the NIN tour. who knows what.
i never really got to come home after the european tour. i had enough time to start opening the mail and doing laundry and we left for a 48-hour trip to london, where we played on jools holland. television appearances are so fucking nerve-wracking. there i was, jetlagged, tired, disoreinted and caffeinated and all of a sudden...look wonderful. play wonderful. i ain't that sort of performer. i ain't the dixie chicks. they were very nice & friendly, though, and they went out of their way to say hello.
i had never seen this show (for those of you int he dark, jools holland's music show ont he BBC is the equivalent of saturday night live...only much more musically respectable). so i went to youtube. i have become a huge fan of youtube and have been gluttoning on old adam ant videos. i digress: so i went to youtube a few hours before we played and started downloading random clips from bands who had previously appeared on the show. radiohead. tori amos. whoever. just to see how they were shot and what the vibe was. and it struck me: my god, everybody is just as nerve-wracked as i am. there are little hints. you can tell. television is scary.
it's a strange land back there, backstage. i did have a wonderful walk around the BBC television headquarters, somewhere in london. it's like an army-base, you need special passes to get in and the entire building is shaped like a donut with a large ring road running around it. since they wouldn't let me out to take a walk (AAAAHHHH) i just walked in circles. there were sheds with entire dismantled situation-comedy sets. i saw an entire soda shop on it's side. fake wallpapered walls everywhere, laying on their sides and stuffed into holding tanks, waiting to become part of a room on a set next season. entire fake worlds, the backdrops of unreal situations. that was a nice walk.
we flew back exhausted and i faced my apartment and my non-ness in it for another 48-hours and then we got on a plane headed for bonnaroo, a huge hippie music festival in tennessee. upon landing we took a surreal walk through a forest in nashville with a lawyer and then i escaped my life for a while and went to see doni from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead (my favorite press on them lately refered to them as "...and you will know us by the length of our name".) he had a piano. i heard some roughs from the new record (which i sang a played pianer on, a while back, in austin) and it's fucking amazing, but i expected no less. we played along to a skipping ravi shankar record for a while. it was in 12/35. a difficult time signature.
bonnaroo itself was, as festivals go, pretty beautiful. it's situated in Really The Middle Of Nowhere, and there were tens of thousands of hippies and freeks. beautiful to see, even though i was, as usual, too spent to actually get out there in the crowd and shake my boot-ay to the guitar meanderings of beck. i watched quietly, in awe of his greatness, his royal beckness. when i saw the puppet show he had choreographed, i decided that we should be soul art lovers in some alternate universe (some alternate universe in which i don't need to deal with scientology, which creeps me out). radiohead came on and failed to hold my interest, but this was probably due to the fact that i was about .4 miles from the stage.
we killed more time throwing a tennis ball around and videotaping ourselves (you will seeeeeeeee) and didn't take stage til 2 am. which was fine, because people were up, and primed and obviously ready to be Rocked, so we Rocked. backstage at bonnaroo was a trailer next to our friends in the bindlestiff family cirkus, so i got to feel nice and at home - despite the trailerness, there were men juggling discs and girls applying bizarre make-up. this always cheers me up to see, no matter who is doing it and for what reason. then slept and went home in the morning.
then i crashed completely. this was when things got a little weird: i got home, again expecting to throw myself into the fervor of Home and Happy and Oh, and instead i plummeted into a wicked funk of PMS proportion (certainly at the wrong time of month). i found myself crying every time i lay still during yoga, i found myself crying over a four-page biographical introduction to a book of photos by robert capa. i didn't even really feel sad, i just felt sort of strange and dissociated, and angry at myself that i let my sacred time off get once again eaten by This Is Really Important You Should Do It obligations. i was finally home and i really only had six days off until my next show. on top of it, i had to practice practice practice for the film and solo nights, which i hate hate hate doing. i need to come to terms with this at some point. anyway. don't get me wrong, i fucking love playing the thing. but it ends there. practicing and playing for me are two separate issues. at some point i will write about this, and it will take up page after painful page of valuable blogspace, alienating you forever.
..........
two days later
..........
last night was a completely beautiful mindfuck.
the first night of the tour - in DC - was fine, strange to be back in it but the boys in the panic at the disco band are total sweethearts, like lambs. i tried to prepare myself for how young everything would feel but walking through the crowd i almost feel like something was illegal. there are not going to be a ton of our fans at these shows, definitely something i was expecting and something i tried to remedy by booking these simultaneous "fuck the back row" film festivals at which i'm also playing solo: to give our fans a place to go if they a) couldn't get tickets or b) didn't want to deal with the situation only to watch us play a support set for 40 minutes. that's why i booked it. it seems that it's going to be serving a far more medicinal purpose.
we showed up yesterday in new york to the typical flurry of activity that greets us here, always a little more to deal with than usual given it's the home of All Press, Our Label, Our Manager...we went to sirius radio in teh morning and i didn't see howard stern walking by our studio until it was too late to flash my tits at him. next time. the venue itself left much to be desired. though clean, it was too clean, and completely sterile, and reminded us of a cross between an aquarium and a movie theater. there were cell phone advertisements installed everywhere. it always takes me a while to realize what's missing and then i realize there is nothing going on offstage and nothing to fucking do in the lobby....and that these fans are not dresden dolls fans. the sense of community is so different, so remote and impersonal. no brigade. I am starting to realize how much I take it all for granted, our fans, the community, the feeling in the audience. I've never known it any other way. I assumed NIN was some sort of excpeption (music about isolation and anger = isolated and angry crowd, n'est pas?). I'm starting to understand. It aint no fucking accident. for years now, our own opening bands always tell us how overly kind our crowd is, how supportive, how open-minded to their music or band. and I've never paid that much attention, thinking: well, of course. why wouldn't they be? they are people, they like music, they will listen, they will be respectful. to disrespect the opening band would be disrespecting us, because we are allies, comrades. Simple. and we take great care in picking our openers so that we can maintain the trust of our audience.
back to our story. so the panic crowd last night seemed to me to be tepid, but decent. i did notice one asshole flying his middle finger when we first came out but I told him where he could stick it. meredith joined us on violin (as she often does) for "missed me" and i left stage feeling like we'd played a great set. but why were all these people backstage giving me timid and sympathetic looks? it turns out that my in-ears were providing with with a sonic wall of ignorant bliss, because there was a contingent in the audience shouting at us throughout the entire set. meredith was yelled at, called a "fat troll" and was threatened with fat kidn sof ass-fuckings, and there were multiple requests for her - and us - to get the fuck off stage. and to shut up and go home, etc etc etc. brian was livid and bashed the fuck out of the drums. w'ere not used to this. we're used to the land of Art Love. this is the sort of shit we were expceting on NIN but luckily missed out on. my god, is it karma? but i was ignorant while it was happening, i found this all out after the show, in the dressing room and in a taxi on the way to the Fuck The Back Row show at the Brooklyn Lyceum. i was troubled, upset by all of it, wondering if we'd made a terrible fucking decision to come on this tour. and then oh
so i arrived in brooklyn, all verklempt, to a land that looked like oz to me. everywhere there were people laughing, making art, performing, being humans....i flashed back to the nokia theater from 24 minutes before where i was walking by 13-year olds screaming at each other while cell phone ads on giant TV screens blazed in all of our faces. i had certainly been through hell to arrive in heaven. films were running, people were drinking, even the brick walls looked beautiful like i'd never seen. everything breathed like it was alive. while the projector ran, the upstairs loft above the space was covered in huge paintings and black emptiness with an old player piano in the corner that i tried to practice on. only every other note worked. mali showed up and we decided to sing delilah together, so we practiced on the incredibly out-of-tune piano, laughing at it. meredith came up and brought her violin. peter brought over a clip light and illuminated the inside of the piano and filmed. titler (hitler in drag, who showed some AMAZING films and played some songs on piano) brought his two dogs up. it was real. i looked around and i saw people i cared about and who cared about me, saw people i wanted to know, felt like i could live here, stay here, catch this moment forever and bottle it. i've never felt more grateful for our fans, the world that we've accidentally on purpose created. and then the films ended and i played my fucking ass off on the piano, knowing that i needed to prove nothing to anybody, that i could just sing and play, that defenses weren't necessary. the audience wasn't really an audience, it was more like a living room of 300 people. so if this tour will teach me anything, it's that i'm fucking lucky for what i have. some bands don't have it, some people may never know it. i feel like the luckiest girl alive, trapped in a lesson in the shape of a sports arena.
three days ago
..................................
i'm on a plane on the way to washington DC, to start the panic at the disco tour. we'll be opening for a band i've never met, never talked to, and whose music i barely know. it should be interesting. and they're almost half my age. my god. it's sort of the flip side of the NIN tour. who knows what.
i never really got to come home after the european tour. i had enough time to start opening the mail and doing laundry and we left for a 48-hour trip to london, where we played on jools holland. television appearances are so fucking nerve-wracking. there i was, jetlagged, tired, disoreinted and caffeinated and all of a sudden...look wonderful. play wonderful. i ain't that sort of performer. i ain't the dixie chicks. they were very nice & friendly, though, and they went out of their way to say hello.
i had never seen this show (for those of you int he dark, jools holland's music show ont he BBC is the equivalent of saturday night live...only much more musically respectable). so i went to youtube. i have become a huge fan of youtube and have been gluttoning on old adam ant videos. i digress: so i went to youtube a few hours before we played and started downloading random clips from bands who had previously appeared on the show. radiohead. tori amos. whoever. just to see how they were shot and what the vibe was. and it struck me: my god, everybody is just as nerve-wracked as i am. there are little hints. you can tell. television is scary.
it's a strange land back there, backstage. i did have a wonderful walk around the BBC television headquarters, somewhere in london. it's like an army-base, you need special passes to get in and the entire building is shaped like a donut with a large ring road running around it. since they wouldn't let me out to take a walk (AAAAHHHH) i just walked in circles. there were sheds with entire dismantled situation-comedy sets. i saw an entire soda shop on it's side. fake wallpapered walls everywhere, laying on their sides and stuffed into holding tanks, waiting to become part of a room on a set next season. entire fake worlds, the backdrops of unreal situations. that was a nice walk.
we flew back exhausted and i faced my apartment and my non-ness in it for another 48-hours and then we got on a plane headed for bonnaroo, a huge hippie music festival in tennessee. upon landing we took a surreal walk through a forest in nashville with a lawyer and then i escaped my life for a while and went to see doni from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead (my favorite press on them lately refered to them as "...and you will know us by the length of our name".) he had a piano. i heard some roughs from the new record (which i sang a played pianer on, a while back, in austin) and it's fucking amazing, but i expected no less. we played along to a skipping ravi shankar record for a while. it was in 12/35. a difficult time signature.
bonnaroo itself was, as festivals go, pretty beautiful. it's situated in Really The Middle Of Nowhere, and there were tens of thousands of hippies and freeks. beautiful to see, even though i was, as usual, too spent to actually get out there in the crowd and shake my boot-ay to the guitar meanderings of beck. i watched quietly, in awe of his greatness, his royal beckness. when i saw the puppet show he had choreographed, i decided that we should be soul art lovers in some alternate universe (some alternate universe in which i don't need to deal with scientology, which creeps me out). radiohead came on and failed to hold my interest, but this was probably due to the fact that i was about .4 miles from the stage.
we killed more time throwing a tennis ball around and videotaping ourselves (you will seeeeeeeee) and didn't take stage til 2 am. which was fine, because people were up, and primed and obviously ready to be Rocked, so we Rocked. backstage at bonnaroo was a trailer next to our friends in the bindlestiff family cirkus, so i got to feel nice and at home - despite the trailerness, there were men juggling discs and girls applying bizarre make-up. this always cheers me up to see, no matter who is doing it and for what reason. then slept and went home in the morning.
then i crashed completely. this was when things got a little weird: i got home, again expecting to throw myself into the fervor of Home and Happy and Oh, and instead i plummeted into a wicked funk of PMS proportion (certainly at the wrong time of month). i found myself crying every time i lay still during yoga, i found myself crying over a four-page biographical introduction to a book of photos by robert capa. i didn't even really feel sad, i just felt sort of strange and dissociated, and angry at myself that i let my sacred time off get once again eaten by This Is Really Important You Should Do It obligations. i was finally home and i really only had six days off until my next show. on top of it, i had to practice practice practice for the film and solo nights, which i hate hate hate doing. i need to come to terms with this at some point. anyway. don't get me wrong, i fucking love playing the thing. but it ends there. practicing and playing for me are two separate issues. at some point i will write about this, and it will take up page after painful page of valuable blogspace, alienating you forever.
..........
two days later
..........
last night was a completely beautiful mindfuck.
the first night of the tour - in DC - was fine, strange to be back in it but the boys in the panic at the disco band are total sweethearts, like lambs. i tried to prepare myself for how young everything would feel but walking through the crowd i almost feel like something was illegal. there are not going to be a ton of our fans at these shows, definitely something i was expecting and something i tried to remedy by booking these simultaneous "fuck the back row" film festivals at which i'm also playing solo: to give our fans a place to go if they a) couldn't get tickets or b) didn't want to deal with the situation only to watch us play a support set for 40 minutes. that's why i booked it. it seems that it's going to be serving a far more medicinal purpose.
we showed up yesterday in new york to the typical flurry of activity that greets us here, always a little more to deal with than usual given it's the home of All Press, Our Label, Our Manager...we went to sirius radio in teh morning and i didn't see howard stern walking by our studio until it was too late to flash my tits at him. next time. the venue itself left much to be desired. though clean, it was too clean, and completely sterile, and reminded us of a cross between an aquarium and a movie theater. there were cell phone advertisements installed everywhere. it always takes me a while to realize what's missing and then i realize there is nothing going on offstage and nothing to fucking do in the lobby....and that these fans are not dresden dolls fans. the sense of community is so different, so remote and impersonal. no brigade. I am starting to realize how much I take it all for granted, our fans, the community, the feeling in the audience. I've never known it any other way. I assumed NIN was some sort of excpeption (music about isolation and anger = isolated and angry crowd, n'est pas?). I'm starting to understand. It aint no fucking accident. for years now, our own opening bands always tell us how overly kind our crowd is, how supportive, how open-minded to their music or band. and I've never paid that much attention, thinking: well, of course. why wouldn't they be? they are people, they like music, they will listen, they will be respectful. to disrespect the opening band would be disrespecting us, because we are allies, comrades. Simple. and we take great care in picking our openers so that we can maintain the trust of our audience.
back to our story. so the panic crowd last night seemed to me to be tepid, but decent. i did notice one asshole flying his middle finger when we first came out but I told him where he could stick it. meredith joined us on violin (as she often does) for "missed me" and i left stage feeling like we'd played a great set. but why were all these people backstage giving me timid and sympathetic looks? it turns out that my in-ears were providing with with a sonic wall of ignorant bliss, because there was a contingent in the audience shouting at us throughout the entire set. meredith was yelled at, called a "fat troll" and was threatened with fat kidn sof ass-fuckings, and there were multiple requests for her - and us - to get the fuck off stage. and to shut up and go home, etc etc etc. brian was livid and bashed the fuck out of the drums. w'ere not used to this. we're used to the land of Art Love. this is the sort of shit we were expceting on NIN but luckily missed out on. my god, is it karma? but i was ignorant while it was happening, i found this all out after the show, in the dressing room and in a taxi on the way to the Fuck The Back Row show at the Brooklyn Lyceum. i was troubled, upset by all of it, wondering if we'd made a terrible fucking decision to come on this tour. and then oh
so i arrived in brooklyn, all verklempt, to a land that looked like oz to me. everywhere there were people laughing, making art, performing, being humans....i flashed back to the nokia theater from 24 minutes before where i was walking by 13-year olds screaming at each other while cell phone ads on giant TV screens blazed in all of our faces. i had certainly been through hell to arrive in heaven. films were running, people were drinking, even the brick walls looked beautiful like i'd never seen. everything breathed like it was alive. while the projector ran, the upstairs loft above the space was covered in huge paintings and black emptiness with an old player piano in the corner that i tried to practice on. only every other note worked. mali showed up and we decided to sing delilah together, so we practiced on the incredibly out-of-tune piano, laughing at it. meredith came up and brought her violin. peter brought over a clip light and illuminated the inside of the piano and filmed. titler (hitler in drag, who showed some AMAZING films and played some songs on piano) brought his two dogs up. it was real. i looked around and i saw people i cared about and who cared about me, saw people i wanted to know, felt like i could live here, stay here, catch this moment forever and bottle it. i've never felt more grateful for our fans, the world that we've accidentally on purpose created. and then the films ended and i played my fucking ass off on the piano, knowing that i needed to prove nothing to anybody, that i could just sing and play, that defenses weren't necessary. the audience wasn't really an audience, it was more like a living room of 300 people. so if this tour will teach me anything, it's that i'm fucking lucky for what i have. some bands don't have it, some people may never know it. i feel like the luckiest girl alive, trapped in a lesson in the shape of a sports arena.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
