I am not a body

"For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with..."

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:48:28 -0400

““For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.””

- Neil Young

ipad art

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:05:56 -0400

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Tom Waits - “Hell Broke Luce” (by antirecords)

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:21:14 -0400

Tom Waits - “Hell Broke Luce” (by antirecords)

Som Sabadell flashmob (by BancSabadell)

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 08:04:37 -0400

Som Sabadell flashmob (by BancSabadell)

Is Newark Watching? - Sowa Mai’s unofficial on Blip

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:35:28 -0400

Is Newark Watching? - Sowa Mai’s unofficial on Blip

"There’s a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:47:46 -0400

“

There’s a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that’s visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren’t shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we’d make it quickly, and hoping we’d surpass it by a long-shot.

I’ve been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on…all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.

And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

I’ve seen people complaining that this is easy for me to do because I got my start on a major label. It’s totally true that the label helped me and my band get known. But after that, the future was up to me. It bought me nothing but a headstart, and I used it. I could have stopped working hard and connecting in 2009. If I’d done that, and then popped up out of nowhere in 2012 to kickstart a solo record in 2012, my album would probably get funded to the tune of $10k…if I was lucky. There are huge ex-major label artists (pointless to name names) who have tried the crowd-funding method and failed dramatically, mostly because they didn’t have the online relationship with their fans to rely on. And vice versa: plenty of young upstarts with a small but devoted fanbase have kicked ass using crowdfunding, because they’ve taken a hands-on approach online and at shows, and have been close and connected with their fans ALL THIS TIME, while nobody was caring or watching.

I tweet all day. I share my life. My REAL life. The ugly things, the hard things. I monitor my blog religiously. I read the comments. I ask for advice. I answer questions. I fix problems. I take fans at their word when they see me at a show and tell me their vinyl arrived broken in the mail. I don’t try to hide behind a veil of fame. I don’t want to be anything more than totally human. I make mistakes, get called out, and apologize. I share my process. I ask for help SHAMELESSLY. I sleep at my fans houses. I eat with them. I read the books they write. I see their plays and dance performances, online and in real life. I back their own crowdfunding projects. I get rides home with them. I’m the kind of person they WANT to help, because they know me well enough, after years of connecting, to know WHO I ACTUALLY AM. They don’t just get a photoshopped snapshot of my every time I have an album to promote. They see the three-dimensional person, in motion, in real-time. Living and working.

There is no marketing trick. There is human connection, and you can’t fake it. It takes time and effort and, most importantly: you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you’ll be miserable.

We’re entering the era of the social artist. It’s getting increasingly harder to hide in a garret and lower your songs down in a bucket to the crowd waiting below, wrapped in a cloak of sexy mystery above. That was the 90s. Where an artist could be as anti-social as they wanted, and rack up cred left and right for shoe-gazing and detaching. It’s over. The ivory tower of the mysterious artist has crumbled. If you’re painfully shy and antisocial and hate tweeting and blogging and connecting and touring…and you really just want to write and sing music and be left alone, you can still succeed…if your music is BRILLIANT. But you better have a damn clever boyfriend, girlfriend or friend-manager to fight your battle for you and lift the megaphone in your name, because no longer will a huge, magical company scoop you up and do all the heavy lifting (or if they do, they’ll charge you 100% of your income for the service).

I got asked today on Twitter: “why is an artist your size using kickstarter? shouldn’t you leave crowdfunding to the peple who need it?”

I answered: all artists at every level (even the Gagas and Madonnas) have to somehow raise capital for their work, whatEVER level it’s at. some artists go to labels/companies for the capital to fund albums & tours. Now artists (at any level) can go direct to their fans. The end.

The basic tenets of success in music are still true: have good songs, touch people, work hard. But as far as getting around from place to place… musicians are no longer traveling by limo with one-way glass protecting them from view. Now we’re all going on foot, door to door, in the open sunshine… with the internet as our magical, time-space defeating sidewalk.

love,
amanda
@amandapalmer

”

Photo

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:25:43 -0400

"neutralisation of the artist is despite the fact that most artists, who, without questioning the..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:07:12 -0400

“neutralisation of the artist is despite the fact that most artists, who, without questioning the social model of their practice, will still claim that they want to, and do, influence the social consciousness of society. But in general their unquestioning acceptance of what has been defined through art history and current social norms as a legitimate procedure for art practice, has entrapped them into reiterating existing precedence.”

- Pluralism as a Social Function of Art, 1986 — Stephen Willats

"A genuine smile married to a watery eye can be a powerful thing."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:33:54 -0400

“A genuine smile married to a watery eye can be a powerful thing.”

- Advancing a New Form of Comedy - Storytelling - NYTimes.com

"nobody is likely to give the world another Blonde on Blonde, another Layla, another Blue, or, for..."

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:57:06 -0400

“nobody is likely to give the world another Blonde on Blonde, another Layla, another Blue, or, for that matter, another Born to Run. You’d laugh at anyone foolhardy enough to try, to go for that kind of sincerity, to produce something that grooves and spins with effort and inner sweat. Everything has gotten trivial and small and ironic and cynical, and that’s that. Here we are now, entertain us.”

- I hate Elizabeth Wurtzel, but I love Bruce… - Dwayne Johnson and Roll

"The Stoic philosopher Epicurus maintained that free will was only an illusory sense we experience..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:56:36 -0400

“The Stoic philosopher Epicurus maintained that free will was only an illusory sense we experience when the actions necessitated for us by circumstance fortuitously coincide with what we happen to want”

- Will Self: Walking is political | Books | The Guardian

"Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust, her magisterial history of walking, writes of her own experiences of..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:56:09 -0400

“Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust, her magisterial history of walking, writes of her own experiences of danger during nighttime promenades in San Francisco: “I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me – all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils.” And so she realises that “many women had been so successfully socialised to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realising why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them …” She later observes that “Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public.””

- Will Self: Walking is political | Books | The Guardian

"Writing in the 1840s, Friedrich Engels notes the “brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:51:58 -0400

“Writing in the 1840s, Friedrich Engels notes the “brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest”,”

- Will Self: Walking is political | Books | The Guardian

"On the 50th anniversary of his expansive recording career, then, perhaps Dylan’s studio ethic..."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:57:59 -0400

“On the 50th anniversary of his expansive recording career, then, perhaps Dylan’s studio ethic may be the closest we will ever come to understanding him, as an expression of human emotion over mechanical precision.”

- Bob Dylan’s first album turns 50

Photo

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 12:23:28 -0400

"This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that..."

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:58:17 -0400

“

This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can’t even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you’re attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that’s what you’re doing.

And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. So … (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.

Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and “man” of contemplation. But in America’s early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like “Character, the Grandest Thing in the World.” And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “A man who does not offend by superiority.”

But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they’ve known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that’s the world we’re living in today. That’s our cultural inheritance.

”

- Susan Cain: The power of introverts | Video on TED.com

"we’re “especially empathic”. We think in an “unusually complex..."

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:42:42 -0400

“we’re “especially empathic”. We think in an “unusually complex fashion”. We prefer discussing “values and morality” to small talk about the weather. We “desire peace”. We’re “modest”.”

- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain – review | Books | The Guardian

"Dylan was more proud of his work than anything he had written before, and admitted it in a CBC radio..."

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:46:51 -0400

“

Dylan was more proud of his work than anything he had written before, and admitted it in a CBC radio interview in 1966. “Anybody can be specific and obvious,” Dylan said of his songwriting in an interview in 1966. “That’s always been the easy way. The leaders of the world take the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about. My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing—only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called nowhere” (Marcus 33).

To write from inside of nowhere, to write something inspired by all of history, to write about nothing and make it worth something, was Dylan’s own idea of the ultimate accomplishment in literature. He believes, along with not a few critics, that he attained it in this song.

”

- Like A Rolling Stone Songwriting

"creativity is a catchall term for a bundle of distinct processes"

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:14:09 -0400

“creativity is a catchall term for a bundle of distinct processes”

- Jonah Lehrer and the New Science of Creativity | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

"In a scene from the original film, two Conservative advisers tell Thatcher that she needs to soften..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:14:28 -0400

“

In a scene from the original film, two Conservative advisers tell Thatcher that she needs to soften her image after they watch her being interviewed on television. In the Russian version, which has been dubbed to have her say that she would crush the working class, an adviser responds: “Of course you went a bit over the top … One of them [the workers] could be literate and have a television and see everything and tell all the rest,” he says, “and then rumours would spread that you are a pitiless, heartless bitch.”

Creating a new script over pirated films is nothing new in Russia; one famous translator working under the pseudonym Goblin made his name by making entertaining versions that were sometimes better than the original.

”

- Iron Lady lost in Russian translation | World news | guardian.co.uk