Amanda Palmer as a statue for a children’s book benefit at the New York Public Library.
And here’s David Hirst’s Verity, that she’s recreating.
this is incredibly awesome
What was even more awesome was that it was funded by my patrons, but also served as a book donation drive for kids’ books at the NYPL. We got hundreds of donations; it was awesome.
The child that was in my belly is now 8. :)
THE DRESDEN DOLLS ARE ABOUT TO TOUR a whole set of BRAND NEW UNRELEASED SONGS to THE SOUTH and BEYOND. We are still quietly working on a not-so-quiet new record.
Wish us GODSPEED, and come ready to rage and cry and look like whatever you wanna. Everybody is always welcome in the tent of the punk cabaret.
Most shows are sold out or near sold out, get on it.
March 22: Mohawk, Austin TX **LOW TICKET WARNING**
March 23: Mohawk, Austin TX **SOLD OUT**
March 26&27: The Kessler, Dallas TX **LOW TICKET WARNING**
March 29: The Eastern, Atlanta GA **LOW TICKET WARNING**
March 30: Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville TN **LOW TICKET WARNING**
June 7&8: Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA
June 14: 9:30 Club, Washington, DC **SOLD OUT**
All tickets dresdendolls.com
Photo by Sara Small
THE DRESDEN DOLLS ARE TOURING AGAIN!
THE ONLY WAY TO GET THE TICKET LINK FOR THESE SHOWS WILL BE TO JOIN THE BAND'S EMAIL LIST:
HERE IS THE LINK, PLEASE SIGN UP. Just put in your email, it takes seconds, and we promise not to spam you.
....
It’s been a long, long time since I posted to Tumblr, but I have a decent reason to come over: my band - The Dresden Dolls - is finally touring again. Yeeeeee!!!! Brian (the other Doll) and I are slowly but surely working on a new record (it’ll be our first studio album in, gulp, about 20 years), and we are plotting a huge global touring show in a few years. We are getting ready...slowly, and we want to start where we like it: in sweaty, intimate tiny little clubs. So we are gonna do four runs of TEENY TINY CLUB SHOWS over four weekends in the USA this May/June. New songs, old songs, experiments, covers, joy, catharsis. Loud. Quiet. FEELINGS.
We did this in Woodstock, NY in August this past summer (at a 400-capacity club called The Colony) and it was ... incredible. Just magic and sweaty and beautiful and intense and everything we love about playing live. First up is DENVER, CO, at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, which fits about 400 souls.
We will be announcing the three next cities in the next week or so, here on socials and on the band website.
We will be sending the ticket link and password to our email list community about 48 hours before the ticket sale goes live. All four cities will go on sale on the same day. (And warning: our last few shows sold out in a matter of **hours**).We will send an email to the Dolls' email list with ALL ticket links and Passwords at around 5pm, Friday March 10. THEN....GET READY. Those links will go live, and tickets for ALL SHOWS will go on sale with those email list passwords on Monday, March 13th @ 10am LOCAL TIME. NOTE: the venues might be posting the LINK to the tickets, but it will be inaccessible without the PASSWORD which will be in the Mailer. Again, you gotta be on the band email list to get the ticket link. The PUBLIC ONSALE, if there are any tickets left (which is doubtful) will be Friday, March 17 @ 10am (local time for each city). ABOUT THE POSTER: South African artist Niki McQueen made a unique poster for all four cities, and we'll be making limited edition prints of all the art and selling it at the shows and online. And....if you wanna have fun, see if you can guess where we are gonna play next. We promise you: these cities & venues are WEIRD. Denver is like, the most normal of them all....try us.LONG LIVE THE PUNK CABARET, dear ones. We love you all...hope to see you out there.
Hi Amanda.
I’m dying of cancer at 39.
Yes, it’s very sad, thank you.
My husband, and love of my life, Jason, is finding himself very much afraid of the crippling grief he expects will follow my death. I know you spent some time in a similar situation with Anthony.
How did you get through that fear and what advice would you give to my husband, or your younger self, about how to face it?Thanks very much.
Penny
...........
ASK AMANDA is HERE.
If you missed it, I’m writing an advice column over on Substack. Here was the first question I took, and you can subscribe to the newsletter for free to get the questions and answers delivered to your inbox. You can also submit a question to AskAmanda@gmail.com.
...........
Read the answer to the above question (and subscribe to the column) here, the eruption of great comments, insights, and compassion from the community is pretty wonderful:
https://amandapalmer.substack.com/p/ask-amanda-1-im-39-and-dying-of-cancer?r=17pp4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Original artwork for every column is being created by Sarah Beetson.
i know you want it.
the mashup of "blurred lines" and "rape me" that i created with kiwi indie rock legend reb fountain is now up on youtube.
we live in a world that constantly dismisses and minimizes rape and sexual violence.
we sang this for those who - for whatever reason - cannot speak. every day is a fight to just feel sane in this insane culture. to anybody who is feeling silenced: we see you.
we feel you. we've been there.
you're not the only one.
and you're not alone.
you’re not alone.
love,
amanda & reb
p.s. this video was originally inspired by lizz winstead asking me to contribute to her #DoREMeToo fundraiser for the abortion access front. we were able to afford to do a high-quality recording studio & video team video because of my patrons...12,000 of them from all over the globe. if you wanna support more impossible-to-”sell” work like this, please join the community. we are creating revolutionary stuff together: https://www.patreon.com/amandapalmer
Let me start out by saying that I'm big fans of both you and your wife. Lately, I've noticed her commenting about being a single mother, I believe it was on a Facebook or Instagram post of her's, I dont recall. Anyway, how do you feel about her claims of being a single mother and life being hard because she works a lot. As a single mother I felt slightly offended because she is in fact not a single mother but has a husband who is well off and a part of their child's life.
I do understand why you are offended. I think what Amanda is saying is that she feels very much like a single mother right now. She’s in the US, with Ash. She dresses him and walks him to nursery school, picks him up, walks him home and looks after him until bed, and tries to get work done in the cracks, when he’s at school and after he’s asleep.
I’m in the UK right now, working 7 days a week 13-16 hours a day in order to get Good Omens over the finish line. I went home to the US for Thanksgiving, and at Xmas, but in the last 3 months I’ve been home for about 8 days altogether. And yes, I call home, and yes, I’m financially fine should Amanda not work (although Amanda makes her own money and does her own work, and has for much longer than I have known her, and is not stopping her album release schedule or touring plans because she has a child). But she’s being, in effect, a single mother right now, and one dealing with a small boy determined to go to London and see his dadda.
I go home on Saturday, if nothing untoward happens to keep me here, after working on Good Omens away from home full time in the UK and South Africa for 18 months. I cannot wait.
And then we will change roles.
It would not surprise me if, at times in the next 18 months, with Amanda on a world tour to support her upcoming album (It’s called There Will Be No Intermission) I wind up feeling a bit like a single father. (I won’t be. She will come back. But you can feel very lonely if you are looking after a child alone for a week or so, let alone for 3 months.)
(And yes, we are both privileged as hell and aware of that. She’s a songwriter and performer, and she’s successful, has a Patreon that supports her now better than an old-style record label ever would have done. I’m a bestselling author. We can afford food, places to live, and help, and we can afford babysitting and all the other things that make life as a parent less difficult. And we are grateful.)
thanks, neil.
“good, enough.”
what is astounding to me lately, as my feeble brain dawns to the shard-sharp realization at the ripe young/old age of 45, is this:
living, surviving, existing, in order to be measured, and finding meaning only in the measure.
the measuring tape was never within. it curled and danced around me, held only by others.
as if living in that moment of curious terror in a doctor’s office right before stepping on the scale. a measurement; not yours to judge.
like that; twenty four hours a day, 365, a lifetime of held breath while the measure of goodness waited to be recorded.
by others.
it’s a full-throated liberation i did nothing see coming. even though i’ve preached this brand of self-understanding my entire adult life. even though i’ve preached my head off about self-love, self-acceptance, even though i’ve flailed my hands towards a different way, a different angle...a part of me was still missing the point completely.
and perhaps - i still am. sometimes i feel like i’m always just finding the front door.
i understand now: i have spent my entire life falling short of expectations that were impossible and ridiculous expectations to begin with, and i’m only just starting to understand how rigged the game was.
i was always trying so hard to be good.
good. to be good. to be seen as good. to pass the test.
good; according to expectations set by some outside force, some alien bible, some cultish rulebook.
good according to some hostile, cryptic, clinical outside force; a place so far outside myself that i could never even really understand it or hope to visit it myself.
a place so faraway and foreign i could only ever fear....and trust my fear instincts were serving my essential survival.
but the outside measuring sticks never really have your best interests in mind.
how can they?
they don’t know you.
i have spent my life trying to be a good student.
a good american.
a good athlete.
a good punk.
a good role model.
a good writer.
a good child. a good meditator. a good cook. a good host. a good mother. a good rock star. a good friend. a good lover. a good businesswoman. a good sport. a good rebel. a good yogi. a good listener. a good wife.
a good loser.
a good little girl.
a good BAD little girl.
i mean, a GOOD bad little girl.
what a classic.
because everybody secretly loves those. but you still gotta do it right - get it right, do it GOOD - to rack up the correct points from the stiff outside panel of judges. it was never about how it felt inside, or whether it was nourishing. the nourishment came only from the degree to which the good bad little girl (or the good mother, or the good student) was declared a legitimate specimen - and it was always empty calories.
it’s taken me forty-five years to finally retreat away from the clattering measure of judgement from the outside, most of which is just ricochets of halls of mirrors inside my own head, like some echo chamber of past fears - those teachers, long dead, still rolling their eyes - that never dies down but just keeps repeating itself ad nauseum. to retreat from the toxic, menacing and unfulfillable desire to be accepted by others - not as i stand, bot as i am, nor as i come, but as good - above all else.
thank FUCK!!!!
what a terrible fate that might have been! what a limiting number of options would have been on offer in this short life!
like dorothy emerging into the full technicolor of oz, i don’t know whether i’m waking up into a dream or waking up from a dream, but it barely seems to matter. i’m in whatever it is.
i’m only just starting to feel the cloud lift, my bones literally expanding by a few cells, my breath deepening, i can hear the crack of my back and ribs as my heart silently shouts
here i am
here i am
here i am
......
i’ll never know whether these things would have revealed themselves had i not been touring aotearoa new zealand for that particular week of march in 2019, or if neil hadn’t left a month later, in april. or if things, people and countries hadn’t fractured so painfully, goaded on by more fear, anger, and powerlessness than i’ve ever seen simultaneously explode all at one time in my lifetime.
there are a lot of things i don’t even bother to wonder anymore.
but i do know it happened, and it happened here.
from this little singular moment, on this old land, from this strange little point on the globe a few days before the darkest day of the year, i can say for the first time, in my own singular, hoarse, joyful voice:
i’m good.
wherever you are,
know that you’re good, too.
let go of those old voices. the ones in your head, and the ones in your circle. they are many. they are endless. they are black holes, and they are useless.
let them go.
let them go.
i am here, and i love you. right now.
right now....i know it.
you’re good.
and enough.
xx
afp
originally posted on https://www.patreon.com/posts/52525124, and that’s where i’m replying to comments. if you’d like to get these sorts of posts straight to your inbox, and you’d like to support my team and art, please subscribe to the patreon. it’s an awesome and supportive community.
nobody wants to talk about abortion, much less SING about it.
but i’ve been out on the road, trying. i was just uninvited from irelands biggest TV chat show, the late late show, for pushing back when they asked me to play a song about abortion. given that the north JUST legalized abortion, this is EXACTLY the time for this kind of art. but they’re afraid.
they shouldn’t be.
i wrote a long article about it here on medium,
“Singing About Abortion Isn’t Quite Allowed Yet. But it should be” (or: What Happened When I Tried to Play My Song About Abortion on Irish Television):
please spread it around.
we are the media.
(photo: coco karol & amanda palmer, photographed by kahn & selesnik)
vienna konzerthaus, last night.
there’s something particularly poignant about telling these stories - about loss, feminism, abortion, art, about the ridiculous slide this world seems to be making towards fascism and isolation, about light and dark and death - in a venue where the vienna philharmonic usually plays and where my dressing room was dominated by giant portraits of wagner and mahler, titans of darkest dark darkness.
roll over, sweet dead men.
this bitch stole your act.
shot by Gabrielle Motola.
under his eye. you may scoff at those handmaids draped and veiled in long red woolen robes, eyes hidden from view in white wings, but WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PLAYED YOUR UKULELE NAKED?
with deborah from the guilty feminist podcast at margaret atwood’s sequel to Handmaids Tale - The Testaments - epic book launch last night (in london @ waterstone’s piccadilly).
when you’re talking about gilead and the future of feminism, nudity is probably the best policy. even through you can’t actually share the photos uncensored on the internet.
the poetry is endless.
(excellent photo by callum baker ... we were lucky he was there to grab this) 💃🔥💃
(about to tour germany....come join me. all; dates here: http://amandapalmer.net/shows/)
jason webley and i are attending & playing#Woodstock50 this weekend!! oh yes…it’s happening. the location is somewhat secret & only 11 tickets were ever available. headliners: janis joplin, hendrix, the band, and limp bizkit. the tickets were $11 and sold out almost immediately. nudity is mandatory!! it rained yesterday so there’s tons of mud. traffic was insane getting here so we missed most of day one. every attendee has already conceived at least two children. rumors are circulating that bob dylan may show up to play a secret set of frank sinatra covers today ☮️ if you’re in upstate new york, swing by…take route 212 west from woodstock center, drive exactly 11 miles, close your eyes, put 3 tabs of the toy story 4 acid under your tongue, take a left at the flaming guitar, drive another 11 miles with your eyes closed, then take a turn straight up into the sky for about 2500 feet. we are the third cloud to the right. listen for the peace, love and music…you’ll hear us.
Shout out to people like me who have parents who are loving but are black holes of emotional labor… It took me a long time to realize that it’s okay to have mixed feelings about your parents, about your relationship with them.
Sometimes parents can love you but be somewhat toxic to you and your growth, and that’s a very hard realization to come to if you, like me, grew up extremely close to them.
Sometimes parents can love you genuinely but lack emotional maturity, forcing you to perform disproportionate amounts of emotional labor. Some parents manifest symptoms of their mental illness in ways that are toxic to your mental illness.
Some parents, like mine, try so hard to be good parents but fall back on habits of emotional manipulation because they haven’t processed their own traumas and are modeling behavior they grew up with. That doesn’t make their behavior acceptable, and it’s okay to feel exhausted and hurt when they betray you. You don’t have to forgive every mistake.
I want you to know that it’s okay to protect yourself, to need some space apart from them. The love you have for your parents is still valid, and you are making the right decision.
Placing a safe emotional distance between myself and my parents has been one of the most difficult, heartbreaking processes I’ve ever gone through… it hurts to try to curb the strength of your own natural empathy around people you love. It feels disingenuous to your heart’s natural state.
But I promise you, you are not hard-hearted or ungrateful, and you are not abandoning them. You are making a decision about your own emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
I know what it’s like in that confusing grey area of love mixed with guilt and anxiety, of exhaustion and quasi-manipulation and unreciprocated emotional labor, and I promise you, you are not alone.
Your mixed feelings about your parents are valid.
i haven’t been to tumblr in ages and came here just to reblog this because FUCK THIS IS SO TRUE.
your mixed feelings about your parents are valid.
x
Let me start out by saying that I'm big fans of both you and your wife. Lately, I've noticed her commenting about being a single mother, I believe it was on a Facebook or Instagram post of her's, I dont recall. Anyway, how do you feel about her claims of being a single mother and life being hard because she works a lot. As a single mother I felt slightly offended because she is in fact not a single mother but has a husband who is well off and a part of their child's life.
I do understand why you are offended. I think what Amanda is saying is that she feels very much like a single mother right now. She’s in the US, with Ash. She dresses him and walks him to nursery school, picks him up, walks him home and looks after him until bed, and tries to get work done in the cracks, when he’s at school and after he’s asleep.
I’m in the UK right now, working 7 days a week 13-16 hours a day in order to get Good Omens over the finish line. I went home to the US for Thanksgiving, and at Xmas, but in the last 3 months I’ve been home for about 8 days altogether. And yes, I call home, and yes, I’m financially fine should Amanda not work (although Amanda makes her own money and does her own work, and has for much longer than I have known her, and is not stopping her album release schedule or touring plans because she has a child). But she’s being, in effect, a single mother right now, and one dealing with a small boy determined to go to London and see his dadda.
I go home on Saturday, if nothing untoward happens to keep me here, after working on Good Omens away from home full time in the UK and South Africa for 18 months. I cannot wait.
And then we will change roles.
It would not surprise me if, at times in the next 18 months, with Amanda on a world tour to support her upcoming album (It’s called There Will Be No Intermission) I wind up feeling a bit like a single father. (I won’t be. She will come back. But you can feel very lonely if you are looking after a child alone for a week or so, let alone for 3 months.)
(And yes, we are both privileged as hell and aware of that. She’s a songwriter and performer, and she’s successful, has a Patreon that supports her now better than an old-style record label ever would have done. I’m a bestselling author. We can afford food, places to live, and help, and we can afford babysitting and all the other things that make life as a parent less difficult. And we are grateful.)
dear tumblr friends…
to say that i’m “disappointed” by the recent puritan tumblr crack-down on nudity is an understatement. i’m crushed. for many years, while twitter, facebook, instragram and patreon became more and more tight-wound, i always found tumblr a safe haven to post my free & joyful naked art and photos.
i don’t know what kind of world we are coming to - in 2018 - when the naked female body really causes so much distress because people are so afraid of the power it represents.
i was so, so, so excited to post my non-censored album cover here today.
i’ve been working on this album, which is titled THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION - for six years, and the album cover, which is full frontal, wasn’t chosen randomly. i knew i’d have to censor it in certain places.
since my last album came out in 2012 (that was “theatre is evil”, my infamous kickstarter record), i’ve been through a lot. i did a TED talk, i wrote a best-selling boo, i had an abortion, i had a son, i moved to the woods, i lost my very best friend to cancer, i had a miscarriage on christmas day shortly after, i watched trump march into the white house, and then i watched brett kavanaugh march into the supreme court.
but all this time, women were marching. louder and louder. i watched women all over the globe light fires in one another’s hearts and brains. i watched women step up and bravely, shamelessly, graphically tell their truths.
THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
when women are brave and shameless, we are unstoppable.
i am shameless.
i have no shame.
when did that become an insult, to be “shameless”?
WHO WANTS SHAME?
FUCK SHAME.
this record contains 10 of the most honest, vulnerable, funny, sad, dark, and (definitely) shameless songs i’ve ever written. the production is drum-tight, with very few drums: it’s mostly piano and ukulele with a smattering of other instruments, but it’s raw AF.
you can see the full cover, order the record, get tour tickets, etc, here on my website. the first single i dropped is also up there. go listen. the full album drops march 8th and the US/CANADA tour is on sale now.
i love you all.
go forth in shamelessness.
The Change is coming.
x
a
p.s. photo by allan amato, in front of the saltan sea, los angeles.
everyone you love is gonna die
