Dresden Dolls First Orgasm: http://youtu.be/-Su7VOpsl4E
Category Archives: Amanda Palmer
An Evening with Amanda Fucking Palmer
Love her. Love her husband. Love imagining the combination baking inside her.
Love the fact that she’s playing with Morrissey for one date this summer. Kinda wish I could go. Love that she did a cover of his (Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want).
Love the fact that she did a highly relevant Kimya Dawson cover (All I Could Do).
Love the fact that pretty much the first words she said to us were calling us godless for coming out to see her on Easter. Then rambled about a King Missile song about Jesus that she sorta knows (Jesus Was Way Cool – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSfa56tjBQo), then used that to segue into Missed Me, saying, “this is not about Jesus. At All. But what if it was?”
Love that she did old Dresden Dolls stuff. Love that she took requests. Love that she brought highly enthusiastic young helpers from the audience onstage to hold an iphone with lyrics for one she didn’t remember exactly (Dirty Business I think). Loved that one of them kinda got lost dancing to it and had to be reminded to come back and hold the phone.
Love that she did Have to Drive and told the story behind it, how it evolved from the guilt of seeing a dead dog in the road. Personal synchronicity significance there.
Love that she did Runs in the Family and closed with the Ukulele Anthem.
Mostly I loved how much Sophie got into it. You know how teenagers are, it’s so hard to turn them on to anything new, even quality interesting shit, because they’re so into doing their own thing. By the end of the second song, she leaned over to me with a big grin. “I LOVE HER!”
Thanks Amanda, for a wonderful night in Richmond.
Ukulele: A Synapse in the Matrix
I believe I have stumbled upon a Cosmic Coincidence. Although I know now that there are no coincidences. Make of this what you will.
A few years ago, Amanda Fucking Palmer put this joyous piece of propaganda into the world — the Ukulele Anthem. It is compelling, it is infectious, it is humorous, political, and even sad.
This year, I participated in the great Reddit Secret Santa exchange, in which 212,000 people signed up to be secret santas for one another, and send each other surprise gifts.
Much joy could be had even for lurkers, spectators, because part of the fun of the game was posting photos of your received gifts on the exchange page. You can browse for hours, oohing and aahing, laughing and cringing vacariously with the recipients of strange, exotic, and sometimes plain awful gifts.
One thing I noticed this year was a preponderance of ukuleles given as gifts. Strange, because outside of various musical subcultures, one probably does not encounter ukuleles frequently in everyday life. Like accordions, they seem to appear at strange intervals in life, signaling a crossroads of sorts. The warning is clear to all but the booze-muddled and the heroin-soaked: Do not choose the path of the accordion, or you will be doomed.
I submit to you that Amanda Fucking Palmer’s glorious and well-orchestrated propaganda campaign for the ukulele is having its desired effect of spreading temptation globally. Gift-givers, not content on the destruction of their own souls, are sharing their evil payload with innocent Redditors, to ensure that none of them will go down alone.
I wonder what the shipping charge on a uke is, anyway…
Review: An Evening With Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer
Upon finishing up my listen of American Gods, I decided to shift the paradigm just a little bit, and move from delightfully compelling audiobooks to … performance. But just a little bit, as I kept Neil Gaiman in the mix, and added his beautiful, entertaining and sometimes naked wife, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.
Maybe it’s just the space I’m in, but I honestly had no idea just how entertaining this would be. Whether I’m listening to Neil’s poems, probably half of which are to or about Amanda, or Amanda’s absolutely captivating songs, I found myself with a grin on my face the entire time.
Especially… ESPECIALLY… “Judy Blume”…
What a joyful confession! Fuck the “decent church-going women, With their mean, pinched, bitter, Evil faces” who work so hard to ban the works of Judy Blume. This all the evidence you need that Judy Blume is vital. Someone needs to tell your kids the things that you’re too afraid to talk about.
Amanda also does a touching version of Death Cab for Cutie’s I Will Follow You Into the Dark, dedicated to Ashlie Gough, who died of an overdose in her sleep at the Occupy Vancouver protests.
To be honest, the marriage of these two is so perfect that I’m not quite sure who to be jealous of.
Anyhow, please go out and buy this beautiful 3-cd set of live performances of the two of them, from their Fall 2001 tour. You won’t regret it, I promise.
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