Amanda Palmer from the Dresden Dolls

[somavision]

EIE?

Amanda Palmer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dresden Dolls - Brechtian Punk Cabaret
The Dresden Dolls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Gilly]

SLE-Ti 3w4 sx/so.

[somavision]

SLE-Ti 3w4 sx/so.

Yes, I don't know why I didn't consider that. That would be very interesting to me, if that were the case.

EDIT: Actually I definately see SLE now, it very much makes sense, especially the lyrics in coin operated boy. thanks.

[Not A Communist Shill]

I also initially thought she was an EIE a year or so ago or whenever it was, but yeah, sure, I can't really object to the SLE typing.

[HERO]

Here are the pictures:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...den_Dolls2.jpg

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.switched....nviglione1.jpg

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.co.uk/m...Rdds594YRf.jpg

http://www.soundproofmagazine.com/im...AGE-palmer.jpg

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/50...316587ff_b.jpg

http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Amanda+...ty/jSUUDDgPLqJ

http://img.coplusk.net/snippets/arti...66_720x480.jpg

http://www.exposay.com/celebrity-pho...-54-1H2FYa.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3615/...e4309d1b54.jpg

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/...7e963ae9d7.png

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Yi4ZWDndKO...nda+Palmer.jpg

http://www.soundpet.com/images/amand...ensemble-1.JPG

http://www.statetheatreconcerts.com/...NDA_PALMER.jpg

http://www.gardenofunearthlydelights...20Ensemble.jpg

http://c2.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/i...76d59c6ebd.png

http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/u..._kouyoumji.jpg

http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451...9d9a970b-200wi


Here are the songs:









The truth won't save you now/The sky is falling down/Everything they ever told us/Shakes our faith and breaks their promise/But you can stop the truth from leaking/If you never stop believing

[woofwoofl]

Holy crap I didn't dig too terribly deep yet, but this girl's almost certainly gotta be from Beta - that much is pretty much screaming at me... when I dig more, I'll come to something more specific...

[Gilly]

Definite Beta extrovert, Ive entertained both for various reasons. Definitely C and introverted subtype. Her style strikes me as more distinctly Beta rational, so i dont rule out EIE-Ni, but my first impression was SLE-Ti, and her stage presence was rather self-contained and nonchalant for an Fe dominant. Pretty clearly 3w4 sx/sp.

[Gilly]

Also she's something of a monotone which seems forced when Fe types do it.

[EyeSeeCold]

bump

[HERO]

I can sort of see both EIE-Ni or SLE-Ti. I think my ex-boyfriend thought she V.I.'d like an ENTj (LIE), so maybe EIE-Ni is more likely . . .


In an interview of Amanda Palmer, she made a comment regarding Courtney Love, and I'm wondering if it proves that Amanda Palmer is actually a rational type after all.

Amanda Palmer: "I once tried to read one of Courtney Love's blogs and I found it exceedingly difficult . . . She's obviously really really smart, you know, but I think -- like I don't know when I read that blog (since this was whatever year ago some one said 'oh you know you got to read this Courtney Love blog' and I was like 'sure') and I was just kind of pissed 'cause then it's like, you know, if I can't understand what you're saying, and I can, but I actually can't follow this, then do you really want me to listen? That's sort of what I came out with on the other end; it was like, you know, if this is so hard to follow, do you really want me to hear what you're saying, because I had the feeling if you really really wanted me to hear what you were saying you would say it in words that I can understand, and you would really really really . . . I would get the impression from you through this that you're actually speaking to me. And when I was trying to read that blog I was like 'aahhh! you know what, if this isn't in a language I'm supposed to understand, I can't translate . . .'

interviewer: "It's raw to the extent that where, yeah she's sort of talking to..., it's like you're tasting Courtney Love's brain . . ."

Amanda: "Well, you know a famous writer did once say 'first thought, best thought.' And, you know, I mean once again it actually takes a lot of balls to do that -- I mean to just sort of sit there and stream-of-consciousness your way through a blog and not even fix the spelling and not even use punctuation . . . I of course, I write my blogs and then I go back and I read what I've written and I'm like 'oh, spelling mistake, oh, punctuation mistake, oh, should put a paragraph break here, oh...', and you know, maybe that's really f*****g anal, I don't know."


So maybe this is evidence for Amanda Palmer being EIE-Ni.

Or maybe I could ask the (subjective/potentially unanswerable) question of, "Fellow SLI and EII forum members -- which of you are Amanda Palmer's conflictor?"

Yet I'm leaning towards Ni-ENFj for her more than I used to.

[Gilly]

The fucking awesome type

[Gilly]

aka 3w4 sx/so

[domino]

Goddess

Amazing pianist/singer/songwriter/genius. Lead singer/pianist/song-writer of the band/group The Dresden Dolls [which in my opinion was the best band of the last decade (the 2000's), and their self-titled debut was the best album of the last decade (the 2000's)].

I don't care if she's my dual or mirror or whatever. I like Amanda Palmer more than Courtney Love, more than PJ Harvey, more than anyone else. She expresses all my fears, truths, prose, poetry, conflicts, lies, loves, obsessions, mistakes, neuroses, regrets, trespasses, everything in her songs.

Hell yeah!
But I dont see her as EIE.

[HERO]

My favorite album of the 2000’s [the decade spanning Jan. 1, 2000—Dec. 31, 2009] is no longer The Dresden Dolls, but Aimee Mann’s Lost in Space, which was one of my favorite albums years before I even heard The Dresden Dolls’ music. Nevertheless, I still like Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls at times, and I appreciate some of the songs more when I try to play them on the piano. She’s talented, even if I found her latest album Theatre is Evil to be somewhat of a disappointment.




“ . . . People come and go, but these four lanes will never move / Little peach and EXes Jeeps eventually die too / Even if the Russians came and named it something new / It would always look like Massachusetts Avenue . . .”



“ . . . . Everybody join in the magnificence / Yes, everything is absolutely making sense / Every time you turn around your soul gets sold/To the highest bidder / Then they turn around and merger and they merger / And they merger / They murder and they murder / The one who murders most will take it all / Fight it all you want, it's useless / Night [peak oil, abuse/trauma, etc.] is in the way of progress / We're gonna take your cities one by one / Get your kills, cut your cards and spoil all your fun / We're gonna make your life a living hell / ‘Cause stripped of your equipment you'll be forced to face your soul / Truth-lovers of the world / You know what to use it for / Spread the word to all the sacred struggling boys and girls / Brace yourself for [a] miracle / You're in for a nasty shock / When the war is over / You can read the paper . . . .”



“ . . . I was the first to warn you / I lay myself before you / I was the first to warn you / I put myself before you / We are standing on the corner / And you're throwing down the gauntlet / It is not a life decision / We just need to pick a restaurant . . . And for a while it was touching / It was almost even comforting/Before it became typical/And now it really is not interesting/To see a grown man cry . . . To see a grown man throw a temper fit / To see a grown man cross his arms/And sit as if the whole wide world would end if he was not a part of it / But at the same time with no confidence / Never realizing the consequence he's having on the ones he loves because he thinks he makes no difference / We are standing on the threshold of a decent conversation/When I can hear the door slam / I know the face you're making / And I really want to talk to you / I really, really wanted to / But this time, I am giving up / I am simply giving up on you”



“ . . . and you can tell from the state of my room/that they let me out too soon . . . I’ve got some issues to work through / There I go again—pretending to be you / Make-believing/that I have a soul beneath the surface / Trying to convince you/it was accidentally on purpose / I am not so serious / This passion is a plagiarism . . .”








http://www.avclub.com/articles/rando...a-palmer,2033/

Eminem, "Ken Kaniff (Skit)"

AP [Amanda Palmer]: I have a special love for Eminem. I don't know, I sort of have these special loves for different mainstream pop artists, and I just think Eminem is a talented fucking guy—and, you know, an asshole. I also got into Eminem way, way after the fact. I think this [The Marshall Mathers LP] was the first record I got, and then I got the Slim Shady record, and everything after that felt kind of dumb. It just wasn't as good as his first two records. When I was in Santa Cruz last week, this guy was riding in a car which had mix-tapes of Eminem radio shows where he freestyles, and you can tell how fucking talented the guy is, despite the fact—I mean, say what you want about his personality and his decisions in life, there's a poetic talent there. I also like looking at it the same way I listen to Avril Lavigne: It's a really guilty pleasure, but there's also listening to it with my intellect, I feel like I'm listening to it and deconstructing it at the same time.





http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bl/dresden-08.php

THE DRESDEN DOLLS
No, Virginia . . .
Roadrunner

Boston cabaret-punk duo believe devil-worshipping socialists need love, too

Sure, Amanda Palmer thinks she's superior to you, but that's nothing against you. It's just that she's superior to everyone, and a fat lot of good it does her. Driven by partner Brian Viglione's drums, her keyboard-dominated, cabaret-flavored satirical songs are never snobbish, snide or fey. This follow-up to 2006's Yes, Virginia--adds just five fresh ones to six worthy older non-album numbers. The new "Night Reconnaissance" is either a vividly imagined or painfully remembered tale of accused teen socialist Satanists plotting revenge against tormentors "from good homes." The detailing is equally fine on the resuscitated B-side "Lonesome Organist Rapes Page Turner," where sexual coercion comes out all right in the end (sort of). Fervent and fierce, with a half-earned world-weariness that can recall Johnny Rotten himself, the Dresden Dolls mean to make goth theatricality smart. Quite often, they do.

Blender, July 2008


http://www.allmusic.com/album/theatr...l-mw0002402840

review by James Christopher Monger:

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over a million dollars, post-punk cabaret ringmaster Amanda Palmer's first outing since 2008's Who Killed Amanda Palmer is bursting at the corset seams with the kind of feral yet laser focused energy that can only come from someone with the moxie to list themselves in the credits with the word "fucking" in between their first and last name. Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra build Theatre is Evil on a foundation of retro-neon concrete (the 1984 Robin Williams, Soviet-era comedy Moscow on the Hudson is referenced at one point) with delinquent panache, giving nods to 'Til Tuesday and Kate Bush ("The Killing Type"), David Bowie ("Grown Man Cry"), The Knack ("Melody Dean"), and even Alphaville (the intro to "Want It Back" threatens to explode into "Forever Young" before morphing into a summery, upbeat radio jam that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Cars' Candy-O). The band then skips ahead a decade on the beautiful, string-laden epic "Trout Mask Replica," which recalls Tori Amos as filtered through Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness-era Smashing Pumpkins. While all of the comparisons are apt, they merely delineate the project; they don't define it, as Palmer has proven time and again, both as a solo artist and fronting the Dresden Dolls, that she's a wily and innovative, albeit divisive, force of nature, and Theatre is Evil bristles, crackles, aches, and moans with surprising efficiency considering its 15-song length, pairing fractured synths and staccato guitar riffs with Palmer's throaty, untamed pipes, sounding for all the world like a brazenly cool, alternate-universe version of No Doubt.



http://thequietus.com/articles/10085...is-evil-review

Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra
Theatre Is Evil [review by] Marc Burrows, September 18th

The problem with Amanda Palmer is that the 'stuff' tends to overshadow the music: She's a social media obsessive, a born exhibitionist who's frequently naked on the internet, an overt and proudly opinionated feminist who always has a ton of creative projects on the go, and somewhere down the line she developed a baffling fascination with the ukulele.
The very week her album is released she's embroiled in an online tussle with various musical bodies following her appeal for string and horn players to join her on tour for nothing more than free beer and a good time. It's triggered a fascinating debate about the value of the artist, not least at the Quietus, in which Palmer has been eloquent even on the back foot while everyone from Steve Albini to the American Federation of Musicians have attempted to put the boot in.

It's a diverting argument in every sense: yet again no-one is talking about the songs. Often lost is the reason people fell for Amanda Palmer in the first place, as the mesmeric frontwoman of 'Brechtian Punk Cabaret' duo the Dresden Dolls, who could hammer heart-in-her-mouth ballads and furious piano-driven teeth-rattlers while smeared in facepaint and occasionally her own blood. She's a genuine talent with a lyrical knack for lovelorn honesty, anger and vicious wit. At her best she's part Ben Folds Five, part Babes In Toyland.

Theatre Is Evil suffers the same problem as the woman herself, as the presentation and context is so big and impressive it threatens to overshadow the music: the crowd-funded project that took a million dollars in advance and defied the accepted record label model, performed on tour by hired hands and giddy volunteers. That's not the story of the music at all. It's one of many things Theatre Is Evil is not - it's not the thunder and fury of the best Dresden Dolls moments, nor the elegant sketches of her previous solo effort Who Killed Amanda Palmer. It's not, thankfully, the quirkier-than-thou experiments of her album of ukulele Radiohead covers or the Evelyn, Evelyn concept record, which were both occasionally brilliant but ultimately a bit trying. No, this is a proper evolution of Amanda Palmer, her piano backed by a full rock band with the smarter end of 80s pop (Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, The Bangles and Four Non Blondes) firmly in her sights. If that suggests the sound of Pink fronting the Killers then, occasionally, guilty as charged, but for the most part Theatre Is Evil is a satisfying step forward for an already compelling artist.

. . . 'Grown Man Cry' nails the icy atmospherics of Disintegration-era Cure.


Sep 22, 2012 1:28pm

'If that suggests the sound of Pink fronting the Killers then, occasionally, guilty as charged'

I wish I'd written that line, great and harsh description of the few flaws in a really fantastic record.



- from WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER (songbook); p. 7 (Introduction by Amanda Palmer):

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Heidelberg, Germany

Dear Brave Player,

This is the third book of sheet music that I am releasing.

The first two were companions for my band (The Dresden Dolls Companion and The Virginia Companion), and maybe you already own them. In those two books I wrote really extensively about how I improvise my parts when I play piano...and nothing’s changed. Some of these songs—“Blake Says,” for instance, or “Strength Through Music”—are so exceedingly simple and direct that it may seem strange to say: improvise!

I’ve been playing these songs live onstage for the past two weeks and I’ve noticed...it doesn’t matter how simple a song is...I always bend it. Sometimes that intro of “Blake Says” sounds best when played an octave up. Sometimes the intro of “Ampersand” sounds best when played an octave down—depending on my mood or the hall I’m playing in. But I think it may have less to do with acoustic logistics and technical variations than actual boredom. I just really hate playing the same thing twice. So I just don’t.

I like the freedom to move around the chords. In “Strength Through Music” I keep the first chords deliberately very off time, hitting as I feel the urge, while Lyndon Chester (the violinist who is currently touring with me) reads aloud the names of victims from the massacre that happened at Columbine High School. When he finishes, sometimes I play an extra few bars before singing. “Astronaut” has some wonderful total freedom moments. During the first quiet verse, I actually take my flat hand and let it fall anywhere above my left bass hand. Because of the scale structure, it works almost anywhere it falls. The weirder the better. Sometimes I keep things very staccato. Sometimes I add more pedal.

I improvise my way into and out of songs. This is what keeps things interesting for me...and this is what I hope you can find as you’re playing along with this book. I encourage pianists to go ahead and use the guitar tablature as a roadmap and to feel free to figure out the rest by ear, maybe checking in with certain chords below for guidance. I’ve come to believe that if anything is true about music, it’s this: there is no right way, there is no wrong way. If others are enjoying you you’re nailing it. If you’re entertaining yourself, you’ve won. I spent years of my life locked into a wretched pattern of fear (of being found out) and guilt (that I was too unschooled, too lazy, too loud, too imperfect), and though those years may have inspired some great songs, it’s no fun to feel trapped inside a blueprint.

Music is not brain surgery. Nobody will die if you fuck up. It’s quite the opposite; the fuck-ups are what make you real, as a performer, to other people. The more you allow yourself to blunder, flub, crack, shift, and mess, the more you will locate what makes music joyous. Especially you classical folks. Please bang loudly...you probably need it.

Anything goes. So feel free, once again, to use this book as a guiding force to make your own joyous, rambunctious, unique sounds.

You may find that the more you stray from the plotted course, the more you are tempted to throw the book across the room and just start writing your own damn songs.

And that, my comrades, may be the point of it all.

Long Live the Punk Cabaret.


AMANDA FUCKING PALMER



http://www.musicomh.com/albums/amanda-palmer-3_0812.htm

John Murphy: “Another highlight is the emotional centrepiece of Trout Heart Replica (no relation to the Captain Beefheart), a stark piano ballad that recalls the best of Regina Spektor . . .”



http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130421/


“you don’t know how it felt to be in the womb but it must have been at least a little warmer than this.

you don’t know how intimately they’re recording your every move on closed-circuit cameras until you see your face reflected back at you through through the pulp.

you don’t know how to stop picking at your fingers.

you don’t know how little you’ve been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

you don’t know how many times you can say you’re coming until they just stop believing you.

you don’t know how orgasmic the act of taking in a lungful of oxygen is until they hold your head under the water.

you don’t know how many vietnamese soft rolls to order.

you don’t know how convinced your parents were that having children would be, absolutely, without question, the correct thing to do.

you don’t know how precious your iphone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat.

you don’t know how to get away from your fucking parents.

you don’t know how it’s possible to feel total compassion in one moment and total disconnection in the next moment.

you don’t know how things could change so incredibly fast.

you don’t know how to make something, but the instructions are on the internet.

you don’t know how to make sense of this massive parade.

you don’t know how to believe anyone anymore.

you don’t know how to tell the girl in the chair next to you that you’ve been peeking at her dissertation draft and there’s a grammatical typo in the actual file name.

you don’t know how to explain yourself.

you don’t want two percent but it’s all they have.

you don’t know how claustrophobic your house is until you can’t leave it.

you don’t know why you let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown.

you don’t know where your friends went.

you don’t know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.

you don’t know how your life managed to move twenty six miles forward and twenty eight miles back.

you don’t know how to pay your debts.

you don’t know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.

you don’t know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.

you don’t know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.

you don’t know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.

you don’t know how to adjust the rearview mirror.

you don’t know how to mourn your dead brother.

you don’t know how to drive this car.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.”



http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130423/

‘two days ago i posted a poem.

as of posting this, there are 1,947 comments on a poem that took me – no exaggeration – about 9 minutes to write. many of the comments have been confused, many of them understanding, many of them angry.

this is the best thing that art can do – any art, good art, bad art, 9-minute art and 9-year art….reveal things.

the last thing i wrote was the title, because that’s usually the last thing i write.
i could have titled “a poem for dzhokhar” a million things. i could have called it “the past 48 hours”. or “everything in my brain right now”.
i didn’t. a lot of the poem got misinterpreted.

it is always very interesting when people misinterpret art, and then get angry about it.

it tells you a lot about how people work, how they think things should work.
it tells you what they hold dear, and what they are afraid of.
it can be a very good litmus test for which way the wind is blowing.

right now, in the wake of the unspeakable things that just happened here in boston, a lot of people are very angry, and confused….and afraid.
including me. which is why i wrote. i’d already posted several blogs (here and here).

as many people in the comments have pointed out: art is how i deal.
i take the things around me, and i put them in a blender in my mind, and i connect the dots, and i layer, and….i write.
sometimes songs, sometimes poems, sometimes emails.

if my phone had rang at 11:34 and i had spent between 11:34 and 11:43 talking to a friend instead of writing this poem….?
i never would have written anything. i would have taken the call. i had to be somewhere at noon. i had to leave.

i’d had a very strange 48 hours. a lot of people had.

the two days had included everything that went into the poem:

-watching the bombing happen right in my old neighborhood three miles away from where i was sitting, and spending the next six hours online, connecting the dots with my community, and sharing stories, and being worried together, and getting texts left and right and putting my whole life on hold to feel the gravity of what was happening. we all did.

-seeing horrific images and taking in the stories about what happened to the people who were injured and killed.

-feeling the shift of the city and, a few days later, waking up in my new neighborhood and being told by the police not to leave my house, that our neighborhood was under lockdown, and looking out my window, wondering if there was someone hiding in the bushes trying to kill us.

-finding out our morning train to new york was canceled and deciding to leave anyway, with my husband neil. and feeling scared and shaken, and driving a car four hours to new york with the news on, listening, and crying, and worrying, and getting familiar with a boy named dzhokhar and his brother, and hearing the stories pouring out of his friends from high school, and hearing the anger and confusion and worry in his uncle’s voice.

-getting to new york and looking for a place to live. and failing, but not just because we couldn’t find a physical place.
because something else might prevent us from moving there. and things getting complicated. and watching the plans of our life fall apart, and feeling guilty and talking to everyone in new york about what was happening in boston.

-picking my fingers. and getting more anxious.

-going to yoga, and feeling my legs.

-getting reports and frightening photo-texts from boston via my friends, stuck inside their homes, as police and FBI with guns flooded into their quiet little suburban streets.

-doing an event in new york, leaving the event, and immediately reading the story about the boat, and the shoot-out.

-getting back from new york the next night, and going to party at harvard with neil.
-talking with a writer friend, and hearing her stories about the pros and cons of being a mother.
-watching neil dancing, which he never does, and feeling my heart open unarmed in his direction.
-watching my phone battery die.
-watching my business plans die.
-watching my husband fret deadlines and worrying if the next months are going to be harder than we thought.
-watching the news.
-watching how it’s all connected, always. (because it is. we are. we always are.)

right up to the last two minutes of my life before writing the poem:

-ordering two vietnamese soft rolls (or was it three?…for me and neil who was trying to get some writing done in the other corner of the bookstore cafe), getting a coffee with milk, and sitting in the exact same chair in the exact same cafe where i had been sitting a few days earlier when someone tweeted me that a bomb had just gone off in my city, right across the bridge. and looking at the file name of the document of the girl sitting next to me.
…………………………….
many people – even the people who loved the poem – thought this poem was directed “at dzhokhoar”.
as in: you, you, you.

read it again.
…………………………………………..

the first few hours of comments came in and the poem had resonated with my readers.

there was a nice discussion and a lot of nodding heads about the confusion we shared.

then it was found and shared by people far outside my community, who had never heard of me, my music or my blog, and a giant shit-storm started.

people started tweeting that “my legs should be blown off”.
………………………………………………

then a remarkable thing happened.

the people who hated the poem started writing THEIR OWN POEMS, sometimes in sloppy haiku form, sometimes in limerick form, sometimes copying the stream-of-consciousness format of the poem i had posted.

meanwhile a lot of other people were yelling that IT WASN’T EVEN A POEM, BECAUSE IT DIDN’T RHYME.

and another lot of people explained that poems don’t have to rhyme to be poems.

there were hundreds of comments back and forth and back and forth….arguing about what makes a poem, and about what poetry is and isn’t allowed to be and do, and it got very heated.

and my supporters starting linking me to poems they had written about the event, and i shared them on twitter.

and then: someone told me it was national poetry month.

and i thought: this is amazing. when was the last time a thousand people argued about a stupid poem?

or shared so many poems about something bad that had happened?

not any time recently, that i can remember.
………………………………………………..

i am definitely going to resist the urge to publish a book entitled “a slim volume of anti-amanda-palmer verse written during national poetry month”.

but seriously…it’s tempting. some of the hate poems were REALLY GOOD.
…………………………………………………..

every time something terrible has happened in america, in the past dozen or so years, i’ve felt a shift towards fear.

fear happens.

and when you feel the fear, you have many choices.

you can take the fear and turn it into hatred, anger and negativity (WHO CAN I BLAME RIGHT NOW? HOW CAN I HURT THEM? WHERE CAN I HIDE? and WHO CAN I HIDE WITH?)

or

you can take the fear, unravel it, and try to turn it into deeper questions (WHY DID THIS HAPPEN? HOW CAN I UNDERSTAND? and WHERE ARE WE FAILING EACH OTHER?)

sometimes i worry that more and more people are asking the first set of questions, and less people are asking the second.

and i worry that even if people are asking THEMSELVES the second set of questions, they’re afraid to ask them out loud.
…………………………………………………..

i get messages from all sorts of people through facebook and my website and through regular email.

the thing that scared me most (and i’ve seen and read a lot of scary things) in the last few days was this:

a handful of people wrote me private messages and long letters telling me how much they’d liked the poem, and how sorry they were that this shitstorm was happening, and how they, too, had felt some empathy and sadness for the 19-year-old boy….whatever his story or whatever the real verdict. they were also scared by the media portrayal of “people” as “monsters” and the dark cries from the community for blood and vengeance.

a lot of people posted similar sentiments to the blog, in public.
but these people told me that they felt to scared to post these feelings in public for fear of looking un-american, of looking “sympathetic” towards the bombers.

(note: “sympathy” is defined as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” and “empathy” is defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings”. know the difference. it’s subtle…but important.)

so….people are afraid to say, in public, that they feel empathy?

this scared me so much.

think about what it means for us, and what it means for our culture and our world if people are too afraid to speak up about how they feel, if people are too afraid to share their reflections, if people take one step backwards and think… “better not rock the boat”.

and think about what we’ve learned from that phenomenon in the past, and what can happen when too many people think that way.

and…be careful.

was the act of these bombings terrible, unspeakable, horrific? yes.
should the person or people who committed them be brought to justice and should we try to prevent them from ever, ever committing such acts again? yes.

so to all of you reading this blog, including those who are new here, with whatever agenda you may have:

may you be safe from harm and danger.
may you feel at peace in these weird and scary times.

and may you find a way to feel empathy towards everyone.

EVERYONE?

yes, everyone.

because:

the moment you choose to be empathetic only towards your family, only towards your friends, only towards your immediate neighbors, only the people who look like you, or think like you…

that is the moment you fail to see that we are all connected, that we are all capable of feeling pain and all – every one of us – capable of empathy.

for anyone.

anyone.

when the “oasis” controversy happened a few years ago and people were angry at me for writing the song, i wrote about how you have to stop the darkness taking over.

and here, now, i think we need an even more general rule about the current state of affairs:

when you cannot make art about the chaos, that’s when the chaos takes over.’





- from Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds[/I] by Carmine Gallo; p. 75: It takes practice to appear natural—just ask Amanda Palmer, who stole the show at TED 2013. Palmer’s presentation, “The Art of Asking,” received more than one million views within days of being posted on TED.com. The week after her presentation Palmer wrote a lengthy post on her blog, thanking the many people who had helped her to craft, rehearse, and deliver the talk of her life. It really did take a village to build a TED talk. The post also confirms that giving a presentation that truly moves people takes hard work.




- pp. 76-79 (THE ART OF ASKING . . . AND PRACTICING): Amanda Palmer delivered the most-talked-about presentation at TED 2013. Palmer is the first to admit that her punk rock/indie/cabaret music isn’t for everyone, but regardless of whether or not you’d like her music, we can all learn something from her approach to public speaking.

Palmer is a performance artist and musician. You’d think she would be comfortable giving a short presentation. The fact that she is a performer explains why she spent countless hours over a period of four months to get it just right. “I slaved over the talk, writing and writing and re-writing and timing and re-timing and tweaking and trying to fit the perfect sets of information into 12 short minutes,” Palmer explained on her blog.

In Palmer’s 30-page blog post on the making of her TED presentation, she thanked 105 people for their input and credits them for her success. Palmer’s first mentor was “Science” musician Thomas Dolby, who helps TED with their music programming. “Be totally authentic,” he suggested.

Authenticity doesn’t happen naturally. That’s right: authenticity doesn’t happen naturally. How can that be? After all, if you are authentic then wouldn’t it make sense just to speak from your heart, with no practice at all? Not necessarily. An authentic presentation requires hours of work—digging deeper into your soul than you ever have, choosing the right words that best represent the way you feel about your topic, delivering those words for maximum impact, and making sure that your nonverbal communication—your gestures, facial expressions, and body language—are consistent with your message.

If you don’t practice having a conversation, you’ll be thinking about a million other things instead of being focused on your story and making an emotional connection with your listener. You’ll be thinking, “Did I build an animation on this slide? What’s the next one? Why isn’t the clicker working? What story did I plan to tell now?” Your expressions and body language will reflect your uncertainty. Have you ever studied dancing? A person is taught to count steps at first. They even talk to themselves. Only after hours and hours of practice do they look effortless. The same rule applies to a presentation. It took Palmer months of hard work to make it look easy.

After meeting with Dolby, Palmer continued her journey to presentation excellence. Here are three steps Palmer took to craft and deliver the presentation of her life.


1. Help with Planning

Palmer has maintained a popular blog for years. She literally “crowd-sourced” her topic by asking readers for suggestions. Ask for help from the people who know you best—be it on a blog, Twitter, or among family, friends, or colleagues. All too often you’re simply too close to the content. You might be immersed in the details when the audience might need to see the big picture first. You might assume that the audience knows exactly what you’re talking about when they could really use a simpler explanation. Research like this is pivotal to making a connection to your audience.



2. Early Feedback

[Amanda] Palmer read her talk out loud, and the first people who heard it were bored. She was losing them. Her old theater director and mentor from high school gave her “brutal feedback” on the early draft. Palmer reached out to TED speaker and blogger Seth Godin, who said, “Stay vulnerable.”

Asking for and receiving early feedback was just the beginning. Dozens of friends, experts, bloggers, and speakers read the content of her presentation or brainstormed ideas on how Palmer should bring her topic to life. Palmer even approached a girl sitting alone at a bar and asked, “Can I tell you a story?”



3. Rehearse, Rehearse, and Rehearse

On her blog Palmer posted a photograph of about two dozen people at a potluck-style dinner in someone’s living room, watching her perform the TED talk. Among the people she invited: friends, musicians, engineers, a yoga teacher, a venture capitalist, a photographer, a psychology professor. This was brilliant. Creativity thrives in diverse views.

Palmer took every opportunity to practice in front of people. A few days after the potluck, she delivered the same presentation to a group of students at a fine-arts school in Boston. The teacher had invited Palmer to speak to the class on a topic unrelated to TED. She asked the instructor if she could deliver her TED talk instead, and the teacher excitedly accepted. Palmer asked the students to turn off their cameras and gave a “still not-quite-finished talk.” Palmer refined the presentation based on the students’ input and continued to perform it for any small group she could cobble together.

Three days ahead of the talk, Palmer sketched the outline of the presentation on a long, long piece of paper and scrolled it across the floor. This was a great memory tool, allowing Palmer to “see” the flow of the entire presentation. On the plane trip to California, Palmer continued to rehearse out loud, warning the person sitting next to her that she wasn’t schizophrenic, just practicing.

Still, Palmer wasn’t finished.

Once she arrived in Long Beach she had a friend listen to her presentation over Skype. She also performed the presentation twice for the TED team, once on Skype and once onstage for the dress rehearsal.

Palmer’s talk was titled “The Art of Asking.” It could have been titled “The Art of Connecting” because that’s what Palmer did. A winning presentation like Palmer’s doesn’t happen without hours and hours of practice and a huge amount of input. “If I’d done this alone it probably would not have been a good talk. All these people made it a brilliant talk,” said Palmer.




- pp. 231-232 (Paint a Mental Picture with Multisensory Experiences): [Amanda] Palmer’s theme was simple and straightforward—don’t make people pay for music. Since digital content is already available and shareable, Palmer suggests artists should ask for support directly from their fans. Most of the people who watch her presentation probably never have experienced life on the streets as a struggling musician, but Palmer takes them there.

Without saying a word, Palmer walked onstage and placed a milk crate on the floor. She stepped on the crate, draped a veil across her left arm, and held out a flower in her right hand. She slowly took in two deep breaths, posed motionless for several seconds, and spoke:


So I didn’t always make my living from music. For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. I was a self-employed living statue called the 8-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are those freaks in real life? Hello. I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower and some intense eye contact. And if they didn’t take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing as they walked away. [Amanda Palmer, “Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking,” TED.com, March 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palm...of_asking.html


Palmer delivered the first three minutes of her presentation while standing on the crate, reliving her experiences and the people who gave her money. “I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box.” Eventually, her band earned enough money and she quit being a street performer. As soon as Palmer told the audience she had quit being a statue, she walked off the box. The box remained on the stage as Palmer delivered her presentation, its presence acting as a metaphor for her narrative:


I decide I’m just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible . . . I’m going to encourage downloading, sharing, but I’m going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street.

My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box, so blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and how we see each other. And I think when we really see each other we want to help each other.


Palmer concluded her presentation with this challenge: I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, “How do we make people pay for music?” What if we started asking, “How do we let people pay for music?” As she said thank you, Palmer pulled out the flower that she had used to open her presentation, extended the flower to her listeners with an outstretched hand, and threw it into the audience. The audience jumped to its feet for a sustained 15-second standing ovation. Palmer the musician had given the performance of her life and hadn’t played a note.

The Ted.com page where Palmer’s video had been posted received more than 500 comments in one week. Jody Murray commented, “I’m disappointed in my own skeptical inner voice wanting to dislike this talk but in the end it was not possible to. Amazing presentation and examples of such beautiful ideas realized.”

Can you recall ever seeing an “amazing” business presentation with beautifully realized ideas? They don’t happen very often in corporate boardrooms, do they? Yet, Amanda Palmer was delivering a business case for giving songs away for free, a very controversial subject in the music industry, and she did it in a way that her listeners could really feel and experience.




- my Aunt (regarding Amanda Palmer’s “Runs in the Family” music video): ‘Good video... it renders the state of mental fragmentation and it proves that sickness/ madness/living on the edge can be ordered through the power of imagination’



- from The Virginia Companion (“Sex Changes”): “Someone once posted online—or wrote to me, I can’t remember—that they were upset because this song seemed anti-transgender. This is not true. I’m as anti-sex-reassignment as I am anti-abortion or, for that matter, anti-sex (which is to say, not at all.) This doesn’t mean I never spend time musing about the pros, cons and, most of all, the emotional aftershocks.

Sex reassignment, losing your virginity, abortion, Getting It On in general….oh, how liberating to have the choice to do these things! And yet how mortally terrifying should you ever regret the decisions you make.

Note for the Player: This song is good for banging large portions of the piano with your arm.”


- pp. 137-138 (“Mrs. O”): My stepfather John’s mother lived in Lexington (where I was raised) and died when I was about 14 years old. We were never very close, but she was a sort of grandmother-by-proxy. Her last name was Oberteuffer, which none of us kids could pronounce, so we called her “Mrs. O”.

It was her age and the rhythmic quality of her name that spawned this tune more than anything specifically about her. She always seemed like a distant ghost of some far off generation. I remember starting the doo-*** riff for this song and having “O Mrs. O” just pop right in there because it fit so well. The rest of the song just came out in a confused jumble of things my brain had been recently chewing on.

I was in the process of workshopping a collectively written play called “Hotel Blanc,” which examined how the Holocaust echoed through three generations of a family, their stories morphing and overlapping in space and time. We were tackling the Big Questions about our inherited perceptions of “lies” and “truth.” I was a German studies major in college and spent a lot of time thinking about the Holocaust and its aftermath.

One thing that inspired that play—and this song—was something one of my German-born professors said to me before I moved to Germany in 1996. She had been raised in the 1950s, when Germany was in a collectively-devastated post-war shellshock. She told me that NOBODY discussed the war, the Holocaust, H*tl*r…not a word, nothing, none of it. It wasn’t taught in school, it wasn’t transmitted to her from her parents. It was just too harrowing and everybody zippered up into a superficial veneer to survive the trauma until the truth gradually started leaking out when the country was ready.

Shortly thereafter, when I was living in Germany, I started piecing together the fact that my professor was exactly my mother’s age and that the majority of my friends (mostly born in the ‘70s) were raised by parents who had been brought up in this emotional vacuum. And the consequences of that on THEIR personalities was…loud and strange.

It was hard to explain in words, less hard to explain in art.

[strrrng]

Ni-EIE 3w4 sx/so

[lynn]

i thought a lot about amanda palmer's type and i just can't see why she is always typed as a beta (SLE or EIE) ..there's zero Fe or Se in her behaviour.. (or Ni and Ti for that matter) i like her music, but so do all of my delta NF friends who love her ... i'm actually pretty convinced at this point that she's LSE sx/so ... lol. even her book "the art of asking, or how i learned stop worrying and let people help" screams delta to me. neil gaiman is EII ...

[darya]

Reminds me of Charlize Theron. Definitely not E3, more like 6.

[Amber]

vibes SLE > EIE not 3 ..somewhere around 6!7 sx/so possible

[Radio]

EIE artsy fartsy beta crap

[Ian Rust]

It is too much effort to play the video and think about this.

[lynn]

just because i'm curious .. (and to share my observations )

why do you think EIE?
EIE (like all Ni-types or maybe it's related to Si-polr?) have a problem with disembodiment. no matter how emotionally expressive they are they physically always have a certain ungroundedness, like they are missing the ground beneath their feet. their energy/expressiveness is centered in the upper body. amanda palmer is the opposite, she inhabits her body in an even way. EIE eyes are emotional, no matter whether more withdrawn (with pronounced Ni) or outward focused (Fe) there is always an emotional expressiveness in them which gives them away. if you look at amanda palmer's eyes it's like looking into an emotional void (of Te)

why do you think SLE?
when amanda palmer smiles she quickly withdraws again to her Te stare. she's not Fe valuing at all. also she's strong but in a stable way. not threatening to EII's rigid IJ temperament. there are no spontaneous bursts of energy which could invade other people's personal space/get them moving. in her relationship with neil gaiman it's clear that's she's Fi seeking not Ni. (i cannot find any specific quotes now, but that's based on what i read on her blog/fb -posts)
her notion of art is very pragmatic: just do it, it's not hard. not looking for any higher meaning. devaluing Ni. (could also point to SLE .... but SLE's are always looking for the broader context/meaning/are Ni-seeking which palmer is not.) her book "the art of asking" is about how to make money (Te matter) in a Fi way (the notion of charity, relying on the goodwill of people ... this is so not beta .. ) yes, i know that interpretation might be a bit simplistic. i read half a page of her book and had to stop because of the redundancy (that's a LSE thing .. there are no omissions, not letting people connect the dots on their own). my EII friend (who is sx/sp. there are also intense deltas) thought the book is a bit repetitive but generally liked it. the only page i read coincidentally involves a very Fi situation with neil gaiman, where amanda palmer also indicated how she felt weak because she couldn't accept being financially dependent on neil ( ... Te!)

both amanda palmer and neil gaiman are incredibly popular with deltas i know. i cannot think of a single song by her which incorporates anything Fe, Ni, Se or Ti, (or anything which is based on her own (sense) perception of the world and the implications derived from these observations, whether it is in Se - Ti or Fe - Ni manner) and i own all of her albums. the same applies to her book or her physical presence. so what is it exactly that makes people think she's beta? eie? sle? i just can't see her as my dual .. that's not beta dramaticness (which is either emotionally expressive in a Fe way or forceful in a Se way).

but that's just my personal observations. maybe some of you will be tempted to look behind the facade and not be deceived by superficial appearances/stereotypes and see her very delta core. lol.

[Marep]

LSE sx/so. Not sure about her enneatype.