When Young People Had a Dream (Patreon)

hallo loves.

the merch proceeds to the trevor project undertaking was a huge success and i'll post the final $ that we were able to send them ASAP. i thank you all for ordering so much stuff and being so awesome.

life:

i'm sitting in a cafe in kingston, new york, still awestruck that i wound up in this particular corner of the world through a series of misunderstandings with my husband and myself, and trying to make the best of it. it's easy to make the best of it when it's summer and the job of motherhood is demanding enough that i keep thinking that perhaps i'm lucky to be in the middle of nowhere: to give me no temptations. there is nothing tempting out here in the countryside middle of nowhere but the beauty of nature and the package store, which is why i suddenly understand why/how people who live out in the country can tend to have heavy addictions. then again, people in cities tend to have heavy addictions. maybe we're really all just fucked?

anyway, we have remained committed to our hidey-hole compound-house in the hollows of woodstock, NY, which is, in turns, a charming little town with gorgeous little creeks and pines.....and a staggeringly horrific 1969-themed village-sized gift shop with a wide array of overpriced tie-dyed souvenirs from a Magical Time When Young People Had A Dream. the downtown area mostly serves the incoming new yorkers, who come to be charmed and leave. i am not one of those new yorkers, nor am i a local. i actually have a hard time driving through town without being triggered into a minor little depression, because the town (when i'm in a bitter enough mood) feels like a monument to everything i try to get away from: old age, calcification, a museum to a generation's lost dream...and not my generation. my parent's generation. local failed musicians try to impress me with their extensive knowledge of bullshit. arts and crafts are king. and i have to square two halves of myself: the half that actually IS a hippie (i mean, look at me), and the half that fucking hates hippies. this town tries my patience in this department. 

i hear something.

something is beckoning: "amandaaaaaa....amaaaaaaaaanda.....cooooooomfortable saaaandals......"

someday i will enjoy writing about the trials and tribulations and super-first-world-problems of our time trying to live up here, a city-country slapstick interwoven with the story of two artists who have little interest or business in sharing their office-art-empires with one another and the ensuing hilarity as we attempt to create a domestic space that doesn't drive us both into madness (i'll update you, but by the time we figure this out, i'll probably have an entire book's worth of anecdotes titled something like How To Live, Love and Co-Parent Together When You Are Two Egomaniacal Control-Freak-Ass Artists". 

not to knock neil, here, we're actually doing quite well, all things considered...neil is under a massive amount of stress working on the TV adaptation of Good Omens for the BBC/amazon and i'm trying desperately to slow myself the fuck down and not workoholic-ize, partly because i'm seeing and feeling the fleeting childhood of ash before my very eyes, and partly because the more stressed neil becomes with work, the less stress i'm willing to take on, lest we both be fucked. he was supposed to be in the states this fall, but he's been beckoned to the UK. i'll be a single mom for a lot of the upcoming season, which is simultaneously harder (no dad) and easier (no arguments).

the yin and the yang. 

our search for a place to live is going to take us through the fall and winter and we are looking at all of this as The Great Learning Season. how we need to intertwine our mundane lives, our mind-palaces and our administrative and artistic needs together while simultaneously raising a child. i'm not stressing it, i'm taking it on as a beautiful challenge, a puzzle that we have to build and/or untangle together.

wish us luck. love will win the day.

............

meanwhile - i've got a few pieces of secret news...hear ye.

the photo you see at the top of this post is of me, jason webley and sxip shirey (as photographed by sxip's wonderful fiancee, coco karol) at a place in upstate new york called Opus 40. i first came to opus forty when i was about 24 years old and had just met this madman, michael pope, at an art party in boston. he was working on a massive art-film called Neovoxer and i flung my hand up when asked if i'd like to be involved. within a week i was on the set with absolutely no clue what was going on, wearing a shredded white costume and blond wig and doing my best and most soulful kung-fu moves in a parking lot of an abandoned mental asylum in western massachusetts. soon after, i got in a caravan with a bunch of the neovoxer weirdos and we headed to opus 40...which is now just a ten minute drive from where we're holed up. we've had the house in woodstock for four years, but i didn't get the impulse to visit opus 40 until a few weeks ago when fellow-neovoxer creator/actor/musician david franklin was in the area visiting from czech with his daughter and we pilgrimage-d out to the rocks.

the story goes like this: a sculptor, harvey fite, bought a quarry expecting to use the stone (which is beautiful and flame-colored in this part of the world) for his figurative sculpture work. then he changed his mind and decided that the entire quarry itself should become the artwork, and he figured that - using only old-school tools, no electricity - that it would take him 40 years to complete the entire work. 

he died - while at work in the stones - in year 37 of building it, and it remains unfinished, but oh my god is it gorgeous...not just because of its inherent interplay of gravity and light and texture, but because ONE FUCKING GUY DECIDED TO DEDICATE HIS LIFE TO MAKING THIS....THING. 

if my life's philosophy brings me to the ultimate creation of All The Things!!!, this guy Fite's philosophy would be kind of the polar opposite. Just One Fucking Thing. 

one thing that contains All Things.

because of course, as we know, All The Things!!!! and Just One Fucking Thing are actually the Same Thing. 

All-One!!!, as dr. bronner would say, and Opus 40 is nothing if not one of human being's manifestations of Spaceship Earth.

if you're piqued...you can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_40 

and you can bug michael pope for footage of neovoxer all you want and he will never ever share it with you or put it on the internet. *i* don't even have a copy of the film. it's that awesome.

maybe we should Thing a concert there. unify all.

.....

anyway....having been reminded of the awesomeness of The Thing, i brought jason webley and sxip and his wonderful fiancee coco out for a visit with neil and ash (she took these photos of us), and we meditated on the idea of what would happen if all 7 billion people on earth decided to be as into Their Thing as Harvey Fite was into This Thing. i tried to picture an earth covered with 7 billion things this awesome.

this is a large, physical Thing, this Thing, but one could make the argument that people manifest so very differently, some of them write and write, some of them open shops, some of them create spawn and spawn, everybody manifests boldly into the universe. i suppose the question is: are you Thinging your Things as fully as you could possibly be Thinging Them whatever those Things are? take that, socrates. i'm deep as fuck.

but truly: a reminder to be dedicated to whatever Thing is your Thing. because why the fuck now, you're going to die, and hopefully die trying.

am i sounding morose or inspirational?

.........................

i'm inspired, at least.

i've abandoned my hopes and dreams of ever truly unpacking my boxes from my apartment in boston and from years of packing-and-unpacking-and-tour (we're going to move anyway, right?) in favor of writing new music, which, if i'm going to spend any time away from my kid, at least gives me a true feeling of accomplishment, which boxes do not. 

every time i get an offer in my inbox lately, i find myself asking myself a question: would you rather spend 3 hours doing this (introduction, interview, cover song, fill-in-the-project) or would you rather spend three hours writing your own song or playing with ash? it's made it really easy to say no to almost everything.

i can't write in the house around all the baby-distraction (how can you work and write when there is the sound of swings???) and office-vibe (neil has two full-time assistants at the house every weekday from 9-5, and i've got one coming and going) and to break away and try to feel any semblance of creativity, i've found a tiny little recording studio that i can rent by the hour, and this, this, this, is my new pancea, for now. my art-cave, my room of one's own, my blessed sanctuary away from the terror of domestic life.

.........

jason was in town not just because we wanted to catch up but because we're working on a new super-sekrit project together...a theater project, along with my old director-mentor steven bogart, for which we'll be writing music. it's all under wraps for now, but you'll be the first to know when Shit Gets Real.

the music for that super-sekrit is partly what i'm going to be working on in my art-cave, and i'm also hoping to start work on a album i've pictured in my mind for the past few years. 

..........

it's hard right now to be releasing things that i've made and kept in the can (i'm trying to pull together a release of the demo-songs from "the bed show")  and things that i recorded this winter in australia with so much new stuff brewing in my mind. i am really not good at being patient. i like to write and release, i like to make and bake and taste and share all on the same day.

maybe something will spill out of the bowl by accident: that would make me happy.

so

wish me luck: 

today is my first day in the cave. can you tell? i put off leaving for the moment of truth by writing a blog that took me an hour.

i love you all a lot.

you're all with me.

it's lonely in here, i'll be reaching out for your hands.

xx

afp

---------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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