I want to talk about this Amanda Palmer TED talk. I have a lot of thoughts about it. About how much I love her drive and vision and how I want to think a lot about what she says about community and being willing to ask for things you need. I know I get caught up in this “Will I or won’t I get published?” attitude and it really leads me far away from “Am I telling you a story I want to hear? Is it also moving you?” But I feel like there’s something really useful and fulfilling about the second question (or set of questions) and maybe it’s something I don’t ask myself enough as a writer.
I also think it’s amazing to see a woman that certain of herself and her place in her own universe strutting around on stage. And her stories are amazing.
But then I also feel like I can’t just disregard some of the crap she’s pulled. But that also leaves me with a lot of questions I can’t really answer for myself. If someone does fucked up shit and isn’t sorry, does that mean there’s also nothing of value there? What does sorry even look like?
I think I just want something different than the world offers or that I often offer. I’m not that excited about purities of any sort any more. I want to be understood. I want the hurt and suffering to be understood. I want some room in the world for all of us.
Those things seem cheesy. Even typing them here.
But there you go.
What crap has she pulled? Genuine curiosity: I only know about her at all through Neil Gaiman’s blog, and that perspective is necessarily one-sided.
This stuff, I assume?
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/10/amanda-palmers-kickstarter-scandal.html
But, please note the HUGE caveat that the author of the above NYer piece wrote it while thinking that she wasn’t paying any musicians at all. It’s in the corrections to this article.
Here is Ms. Palmer’s explanation/accounting of what she did with the money raised:
http://www.amandapalmer.net/blog/where-all-this-kickstarter-money-is-going-by-amanda/
I was more thinking of Evelyn Evelyn. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Evelyn) but in thinking about why the musician pay issue didn’t bother me, it helped further solidify why Evelyn Evelyn does.
I haven’t heard from any musicians involved with Palmer that they feel cheated or unfairly treated or that this in any way left a bad taste in their mouths. Like she says in her TED talk, she has a community. They have their own ways of doing things. If people within the community want to provide labor for each other in these ways and no one feels cheated or pressured, I’m not going to sit and holler that she should do things the way I think is right.
But being a conjoined twin is not like being a musician. It’s not voluntary. It’s not a skill you offer up for people to use in exchange for something else.
Ugh. I’m having trouble getting at this. Let me try another way. I found it profoundly moving–like I can’t even begin to tell you how much I was shaking with fear and delight–to see her standing naked surrounded by her fans. Wow. It’s incredibly powerful.
If she stood in front of her fans naked except for a fat suit? As if that were the same as standing before them in my body? Or giving them the experience of seeing my body honestly before them? I’d be pissed and grossed out.
And there’s something about Evelyn Evelyn that skirts too close to the second for me, feels too much like “Let me give you the thrill of gawking at something you’ve always wanted to gawk at, even though it’s not actually mine to give.”
ok – I watched the Amanda Palmer TED talk & I think it’s all fine and good that she has channeled her energies into creating community and all that. BUT this is not a realistic career path for most people. It’s akin to promising every child that suits up on a football field that one day he’ll go pro. Or every kid who pics up a mic, rap stardom and riches. For the most part, most people will not succeed in what, if we’re being honest, amounts to using the Internet as an offramp for begging.
Let’s use a local example: our local newspaper sold by the less fortunate members of our community. It was a good idea at first. A person selling a newspaper on the corner in order to earn money and better their lives. But now, we’re a few years into the program and we have people on each corner. In the neighborhood where I work, at one intersection alone – there is a person selling this newspaper, a veteran selling some paper to benefit his community and on the other corner is a person with a sign that says “testing the generosity of humanity”.
I do agree with Palmer toward the end, we *should* set up easier ways for people to want to pay for music and support musicians. But for people to latch onto the whole talk as justification for not working, but rather just asking for help to get by in life? That’s not a sustainable model for life. I might be an ass for saying it, but I have an art degree and even I know that most people aren’t going to get by – much less ahead – in life by just doing what makes them feel good.
Wow. B., I didn’t know anything about Evelyn Evelyn except that she payed in some band named that. I bought Theatre is Evil and really liked it; I read her blog sometimes. I’m a casual fan and I didn’t have any idea that she’d done “crip drag” as a stunt. Ugly.
Beth is right about it not being a realistic career path. In fact, we’re only about four years removed from when I sat a table over from her at Cafe Coco and she was on the phone trying to sort out rent and an overdrawn bank account.
In the other hand, the asshole who owned the studio I used to work for always said that hunger creates motivation. Or something like that. Maybe it’s true. :/
Anybody can love music, and anybody can play it on their own porch for free or pass the hat at the corner cover band dive. But I see no real difference between “creating a community of people who love what I do and just wan to play with me” and various rationalizations used when professionals don’t pay interns for endless work because they pretty much don’t have to. It’s exploitation with a smiling face whether it was actually “paid them nothing’ or, instead, practically nothing, for the “love” of it. Ever notice that the people who do really good jobs of convincing the rest of us there’s probably not a sustainable career in (fill in blank), their popular art, generally already have a career, or at least a job, themselves?. There will not be millions of people funded by kickstarter–just a few who the world’s already heard about before the begging starts. Professional art-makers need to be paid for work, and it must be understood as work, and it must be understood why it benefits everyone to have focused, practicing professionals.
Barry, I’m not ready to write her off as quite as cynical as a major business/firm using and abusing interns, just because she IS an individual, and she’s hardly made it super duper big. She’s a cult artist, and she has an especially devoted group of fans that she believes she has a closer-than-average relationship with. Well and good.
My problem, now that I think more about it: she’s taken risks, chosen an offbeat way to pursue her career, gone out on a limb and had it succeed in spades; therefore she feels comfortable evangelizing about her chosen methods. She hasn’t put in sufficient caveats (for me) about how her education, her past experience, her personality type, her previously-released albums, all the things that makes her unique, in short–contributed to the success of her crowd-sourcing and gave her the tools to ask and get. She didn’t say “your mileage may vary,” she said (paraphrasing) maybe we should all think more this way.
It’s similar to folks who have found a way to successfully lose weight, or raise their kids, or find peace with the universe. Their methods worked–FOR THEM. Overgeneralize them out to you, me, all parents, all overweight people, all heathens, the entire blessed world should do this and only this it is the one true way!!!!!!–and you will have problems. Not all artists could do what she did. Not all musicians could.
It is A way to have a successful music career, you could argue a new way, and it’s interesting as that. It is not the solution to the music industry’s woes, or to problems faced by all artists everywhere. I wish she wouldn’t overstep and claim that it is something universal.
I’m with you on all of that, Jess. Most of the new media artist strategies work a whole lot better for someone who’s previously been recognized, and especially–previously publicized and marketed the old school way.
Jess, you’re hitting on another facet of what the Professor and I were talking about at lunch. I was saying that I’ve heard Courtney Love talk about how one of the drawbacks to crowd surfing for a woman is that there’s always some asshole who will stick his finger in your vagina as you pass over head. And, granted, Love used to crowd surf in babydoll dresses, which might have allowed her assailants more opportunity.
But. That being said, I don’t think Palmer gives enough caveats about the dangers in other women following her example. And I don’t know where the line between prudish old fart and reasonable expectation of freedom in the world is. And I am probably coming down on the side of prudish old fart. But whatever Palmer is able to do that gets a crowd to interact with her that closely without some asshole ruining it by hurting her is not something most women are going to be able to do. And, while I think it’s fine and, in fact, laudable to say “You know, even if i could be hurt doing this, even if I know I am going to be hurt by this one of these times, or every time, it’s still worth it to me to do it and to not be dissuaded from doing it, just because there’s always some asshole.”
But it seems to me to be a lie of omission to not carefully frame it as “this is something I can do” rather than “this is something any artist can do.”
And, like you guys have pointed out, it is easier for established artists to utilize these tools. Meanwhile, a project like this sits at Kickstarter just struggling to get funded:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1537879721/long-hidden-speculative-fiction-from-the-margins-o?ref=live
So, I have mixed feelings. In part, I find Palmer incredibly charismatic and brilliant and thoughtful. But I just don’t think, maybe, thoughtful enough to suit me. But then, who am I that I need to be suited? So, there we are.
Oh, yeah, shit. The Courtney Love story is basically what I would assume is the norm for female artists. I also think of Tori Amos, who was raped by a “fan” when she was a fairly unknown, striving musician. I doubt she would agree that radical trust of your crowd is an unblemished good thing.
B, those writers need Kickstarter? I’m familiar with the work of about a third of them. If they have to go begging….