PATRON JOURNAL VÉRITÉ #001: "REWIRED" {official thing} (Patreon)

hola my dear patrons.

so this afternoon, when i'm hours away from posting this video, a woman behind a counter in boston asks me:

"how many months are you?"

"sorry?"

she points at my stomach.

"how many months are you?"

"pregnant? i'm no months pregnant. but i had a baby like three years ago. does that count?"

she waved her hands in apology.

six hours ago. and i've actually been on a low-carb diet for the past six weeks and lost about ten pounds. life is fucking relentless, people.

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

it's adventures in media time.

first off....thank you again for your sincerely beautiful comments on the last post. i really love you all - and your willingness to share your lives with me - so so much. it's been a fragile season for many, myself included. it's nice to be going through this shiitake together. 

drum roll. 

please hold my hand as we sally forth into a new era….this patron-only video has been a long time - over six months - in the making and, well, it’s kind of an experiment, so please judge it by experimental standards. 

it’s for patrons only, because - at least for some of the content - i’d like to be totally free to make without the hanging sword of extra-layer questions, like “will people like it?” and “will i get yelled at?” and “will it go viral?”

when making digital art/video/music/content for the internet - these are the three questions that fucking plague me.

question number one - "will people like it?" - isn’t, of course, all that hard for me to grapple with, and i’ve been grappling with it since i wrote my first songs as a teenager. fact: i want people to like my art. i want people to like me. i’m, y'know, human. and an artist. i'm a human artist. we like people to like us. it isn't weird.

but the second question - “will i get yelled at” - (and her close cousin “will i get made fun of”) really wasn’t a consideration until the advent of youtube and facebook comments started darkening my doorstep. and i'm not an artist who mostly makes music out there in the "real world" and occasionally turns to the internet. i make music for people on the internet, and then i take it to the stages and theaters of the real world. it wasn't the life i was expecting, but it happened that way...with all attending bullshit. 

the third question - “will it go viral?”- is perhaps the darkest one of all.

i made music videos in the pre-youtube era (i’m that old, people) and of course we wanted our content to be strong, wonderful, delightful, brave…all the things. videos like “girl anachronism” and "coin-operated boy". we wanted to show who were were, where we lived, what we believed, what the band was about, we just wanted to show how fucking awesome we were. but i don’t remember having to think “will this go viral?”/“will this be notable/shocking/funny enough for people to want to share?”

and thank christ.

and seriously: i am so glad i didn’t have to think that. it left us free to more simply express who we were, and make art that we thought was fun, true, honest, brave, whatever. 

and maybe all y'all don’t spend your hours pondering the philosophical and psychological ramifications of what the internet has done to us: as people, as artists, as creators, as a society….but i spend my life thinking about it.

it’s a huge reason - the main reason - i started this patreon.

i didn’t just do it to make money.

the money is great. i need the money to make the art and pay my team. but there are lots of ways i could have gone about "monetizing" my artwork on the internet - you all know that. 

yes, it's about having money to do this. but more, it’s about the connection with you, and mostly: 

it's about the artistic freedom. 

the freedom to play, to experiment, to muse, and to communicate with my tribe of people without my brain being poisoned by the rest of the internet, which has changed from something nerdy, solid, supportive and community-driven (well....at least it felt that way to me in 1998-2010 or so) to something crass, mean and profit-driven. this is the internet that i see in 2018.

that's why i came here. i like to think it's why all 11,000+ of you came here too. to find new roads, new ways of connecting as artist-audience-community.

……………….

notes for watching:

this is not safe for work. 

there’s a lot of nudity.

i really suggest watching in the privacy of your own privateness. it may make you a bit emotional. grab a tissue.

the back story is wonderfully serpentine, like many of these weirdo projects of mine. i met the wire artist, skye ferrante, while walking down a street in new york city.

this was in the spring of 2014, when i was living in a little rental apartment on sullivan street in soho and working between 8-10 hours a day STRAIGHT on editing “the art of asking” to get it into the publisher on time, which was a joke, we’d already blown past two drop-dead deadlines and we were literally looking at the clock as we salved and edited so that Hachette could release it in the fall. neil was off at a refugee camp. we’d just had an abortion. our marriage wasn’t in a good place....it wasn’t a very fun time of any of our lives.

i was walking in the streets one day from the apartment to cafe gitane for my one-exciting-coffee-and-avocado-toast-a-day-celebration, and i saw this GUY on the corner. one of my brothers; a street performer. he was standing on a stool and making wire sculptures at lightning speed for people. for money. 

he looked like this

(image care of twitter)

he was twisting a long spool of thin wire - the size of soldering wire - into names, into words, into shapes. he had a selection of his pre-fab wire-artwork for sale on a portable table. i stopped and watched him for a while. when he had a break, i went up and introduced myself, and told him i was a statue street performer. we bonded and talked, and we exchanged emails. i sent him my TED talk. he sent me links to his larger scale wire work, which he sometimes hangs in galleries.

(image from here.) 

i was totally fascinated by the idea of wire-as-body. the new york times covered his portrait work:

photo by alex wroblewski for the new york times

in addition to portraits, he also sculpts words and intricate landscapes in wire...

(a hong kong seascape)

so, that was skye. you can see more of his work on his instagram @manofwire.

i walked on....and he stayed in my brain.

this was, remember, before the patreon was even a glimmer in my eye.

.......

many years later (in 2016) when the patreon was ignited and i thought about strange, creative endeavors that i could NEVER do without instant, trusting funding, i dropped him a line. let’s do a thing! the initial idea was to do a life-modeling session; someone could film it. maybe we could film the whole thing in accelerated motion and show how beautiful the process was....? i could compose music for it...?

so after two years of talking about it, i got my trusty and longstanding ally-filmmaker comrade michael pope on board, and we all got together in a loft in middletown connecticut - during the time that pope and i were there teaching our “art of doing” course - and we did The Thing. whatever it was gonna be. we decided to just see what happened.

photo by eddie hollenbeck

photo by eddie hollenbeck

photo by eddie hollenbeck

photo by michael mccomiskey

photo by michael mccomiskey

i posed, skye created a wire portrait, and we filmed the whole thing…..really not sure what we were going to do with it.

there it sat.

and for four to five months, pope and i considered what to do with it. it wasn’t quite a piece in itself - there wasn’t enough depth to make it into a lone-standing video. 

we thought and thought. we did a process-interview about the whole idea of body rewiring while we were at wesleyan.....we thought what might amount to a kind of meta-topic about bodies. it wasn’t enough. we thought and thought. winter came and went and we still weren’t quite sure what to do with the footage.

then, this spring, we got an idea.

we met at me & neil's current house in woodstock and we filmed more footage. in the yard, in the bedroom, in my office.

i’ll say no more.

watch it and judge.

one ask, from me.

if you like this format, this kind of collage-y, episodic, dream-like-lifelike-diary-entry-like video format, we’ll keep doing these.

consider this episode #001.

they take a lot of time and work and it’s probably never going to be clear what we’re doing until we’ve done it, but i can imagine these growing into a really beautiful form of expression over time, especially if we’re always working on one in the caves and putting them out a few times a year. 

so again, if you like the idea of us following this path, please: hands up. we’ll do more. as i suppose you have learned at this point, i’m never dry or at a loss for words…we have endless things to fucking consider and discuss, life is never dull and it's never done. so, between this and the idea of a podcast, there’s lots of nice avenues….many media that We Can Be.

and for now, i’m going to keep this one private. if you like it, you can go ahead and share the link to this post and encourage people to join the patreon community to watch it. if you feel someone could really benefit from seeing it and they just don’t have the dough, go ahead and send them the video link and password. just don’t do it publicly. send it to them via text and email. 

maybe i'll put it out on the internet once we have our own moment with it. or maybe i just won't. right now it doesn't need to matter.

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

https://vimeo.com/286903833
password: Verite1

NOTE: the password is case sensitive.

ONE EXTRA SURPRISE: yes...i composed and recorded all this soundtrack music JUST for this project. i recorded it back in new york city last september at the filmmaker ari gold's apartment with a local NYC mobile engineer named steve mecca.

ari loaned me his apartment and piano, i paid for a tuning, and i spent a day composing and a day recording.

here's a short video clip i posted to instagram when i was recording:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BY_V-jRnclw/?taken-by=amandapalmer

since i figured you guys would want to HAVE some of the soundtrack music, i'm putting together a little mini-EP of the soundtrack material (they weren't recorded to be completed "tracks", they were recorded to be snipped up into film bits...), for your ears only. i want you to focus on the clip for now so i'll send you the EP in a few days (it won't be a separate Thing, this is it).

i'll put it up for streaming for all patrons and send the $3+ folks a little download package link. $5+ folks, i'm going to put together a little weird-ass behind-the-scenes fun-bag stuff for you as well. stay tuned.

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

and....

that's it for now.

please, comment. comment whatever you want.

comment about the content, comment about the ideas. comment about whether or now you want to see more of this kind of work. just let me know you're out there.

i love you all.

and thank you for your incredible support, all of you, at every level.

it means the world to me to be able to work with freedom, with the strangers i meet on the street - my street-brethren - and the people i love....you

love....

me

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

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2. see All the Things i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

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