Аманда Палмер: The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

Icame back from Australia. I’d written way more material than I needed. I figured whatever was left over, I could blog.

Neil and I are still trying to figure out where we’re going to live. The intimacy/commitment Venn diagram continues to merge. I’m trying not to keep score anymore. I’m learning.

Anthony stayed fine for a while, but at the moment that this book is going to press, he isn’t fine. He stayed in remission for over a year; then the cancer came back. His doctors decided he should get the bone marrow transplant. He’s going to have it within a few months. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. He has a donor lined up, a perfect match, that person is a gift-giver of the highest order. The doctors say Anthony has a 40 percent chance of surviving, but who knows what that means. He’s also back on chemo. I’m not touring very much, in case anything bad happens. He also helped me edit the book.

Lee is still running the Cloud Club. He also helped me edit the book. I’ve kept my apartment there. It’s currently being crashed in by Michael Pope (who also helped me edit the book—and who is making a new, epic experimental film that will no doubt rope hundreds of volunteers into its vortex). And a few weeks ago my apartment housed an entire Bulgarian family.

Yana has a new job. The Australian government assisted her financially during her recovery and unemployment status. She took the donuts.

Gus is still making ice cream at Toscanini’s, but the Harvard Square branch closed permanently due to local construction. You’ll have to go to Central Square to get a scoop of chicory root or bourbon black pepper.

Casey is also still living at the Cloud Club. She’s painting and teaching art to preschoolers in Brookline.

Instead of getting yet another fish after Everything, Casey decided to adopt a cat from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

She named her Something.

by Jamy Ian Swiss

At the risk of stating the obvious, Amanda Palmer is a complex person. I can, at least, state this with some up-close-and-personal authority, knowing her as an artist, as a friend, and also now as a creative collaborator. I lent a hand and an ear when she was preparing her TED talk, and have spent much of the past year in the role of what she has dubbed her “book doula,” helping her to birth this book in your hands. (It’s all in the breathing.)

As passionate as the affection is that Amanda’s friends and fans have for her, there are some outside those circles who seem to have difficulty understanding what makes her tick. When the media asked her to explain how her music Kickstarter became so successful, they came expecting answers about business plans and social media strategies.

But that’s not where the answers will be found.

Her fans already understand that her relationship with them is inseparable from her art. Her remarkable songs and music are the artistic end product, but really, it is all a part of the messy dish that comprises her indefinable specialty: mixing, blending, cooking up, hosting, and serving a passionate stew of human connection.

Social media is not a separate piece of her. It is her—just as the songs are her, the music is her, the blog, the communicating, the hugging and hand-holding—the empathy is her. Her friend and mentor, Anthony, taught her the empathy part and much more, and she keeps trying to explain it to the rest of us, and acting on it when she is most severely tested—within her most intimate relationships or out in full view of the public eye. As I worked with her to help shape the book she was writing, we practiced everything she preaches in these pages.

In a culture that routinely sees creativity, art, and the human body as mere commodities, many find it difficult to grasp that there might be another point of view. Those who live in a world of cynicism and marketing can’t quite wrap their heads around the idea that Amanda can be who she claims to be. That she can be exactly who she really is. That she can be that true, that authentic.

Perhaps, with this book, they can believe she is real.

I am, first and foremost, a musician. Writing a book was great, but I desperately want you to hear my music so I don’t lose track of myself. I made a playlist of all the songs used/mentioned in this book, and I threw in a special “welcome to my actual life” page of my website for those of you who have just read this book without having any idea who I am or what my songs sound like. It all started with the Art Itself, and I hope the book leads you back there.

The playlist is free—you can take it, or pay what you want:

The page also has a gallery of book-related pictures, and links to the artists mentioned in this book. And a link to the blogs that relate to the story, and my current blog. And, duh, the Email List of Gold.