Evacuation Plan. or: what we made at the batalcan in paris. (Patreon)

(public post)

hallo loves

greetings from a plane. 

planes feel different after a couple weeks of climate speeches and climate marching. (book tip: i'm currently halfway through jonathan safran foer's new book "we are the weather"... highly recommended, sobering, life-altering).

i feel change. 

a change? the change? i don't know. my change, and the world's.

in my little bubble, there's a lot about to happen: the UK tour is about to get a big push, the australian/new zealand tour dates are about to be announced, i'm about to write a big blog about the climate strike and my plans for involvement (and how it will dance with/impact the patreon) over the next few months.

you plan things and you never know quite how they’re going to go, what they’re going to feel like. you get an inkling.

anyway, in the cracks here, 

i wanted to say a word about the paris show.

photo by robert gil)

i wrote a blog last week about why i was playing the bataclan nightclub in paris (instead of a traditional concert hall or theater, which i’m doing in every other city of this tour).

long story short-ish: the dresden dolls played there in 2006. it was an epic evening (go see the photo gallery in that last link, holy fuck).

then: we were shattered and upended when the terrorist shooting happened. clearly: it could have easily been our band, our night, our community, our merch person gunned down as they worked in our service, selling our goddamned t-shirts. 

we knew. it was random, and we were simply lucky. it affected the entire touring music community: it’s such a small clan, this tribe of sound and light and merch and musician people who live on the road and all play the same venues.....everybody knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody who was there that horrific night.

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

i wandered around the venue friday afternoon. as soon as we loaded in. took some pictures....

i’d found myself wondering what the shows felt like…after the club re-opened. i remember reading a brief news article about the re-opening of the bataclan; the tributes paid, about the benefits and so forth.

but now it’s four years later. 

when do things get back to normal? do they ever? what about the people who went to the show and survived? the staff? do they return? do they panic? i didn’t have a way of easily finding these answers. 

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

place holds time. place holds memory. 

psychogeography.

anybody who’s been traumatized - or anybody, really, who has a human past - can tell you this: the shape of the car, the smell of the kitchen, the highway exit where you used to turn off to the hospital, the store where you were caught, the park where they left you, the bedroom window you looked out when “it” happened.... 

the places hold their own meanings, they become bigger, other. symbols. places that hold, grip, places that continue to terrorize after the action itself is over.

i remember seeing a beautiful TED talk a couple years ago about architecture and how unfriendly it can be, and how designers have started to work with emotions in mind.

during the talk, the speaker threw up a slide of the new sandy hook school - which they’d razed to the ground and rebuilt after a whole bunch pf elementary school children were massacred there in 2015. 

i hadn’t even known they’d razed it to the ground, but as i sat there in the TED hall, i remember all those thoughts tumbling down my mind-slide at the same time:

-tear down the entire school and rebuild it? just because a shooting happened there?

-good lord, yes, yes, of course, amanda…think of them, their fresh memories, their small faces…their tiny raw, hearts…..

-god, i wonder who protested and said it was a waste of money….

-what is a waste of money when children are living in trauma….?

the architect who designed the new sandy hook elementary school created a design that was literally built to welcome these children, hold them, make them feel safe:

soft waves of nurturing roof-lines billow to the sky. 

wood, not steel. 

curves, not angles.

the building tries to be a hug.

god. so different from the painfully prison-like brick and steel schools i remember hating the very shape and sight of when i was a school-child.

as a performer, i always want to be that building. ever since the early days of the dresden dolls, that’s the architecture we were always trying to create, sonically, physically, in any way we could with whatever material. 

our first shows were literally in my old boston house (which in itself is like a building-hug), and our friends' houses (other building-hugs, like pan 9 and the zeitgeist gallery).

but soon, our shows were almost always set in other peoples' houses. site nightclubs. bars with metal floors and bad lighting. non-hugs.

we would festoon the lobbies with painted statue friends and garlands, we would hang christmas lights, we would try to make the space a hug.

i would go into all the bathrooms and scatter flowers and glitter on the counters next to the filthy sinks. i had no idea if anybody would care, but i knew i fucking would. i knew I WOULD care if i was at a band’s show and someone in the band had bothered to make the bathroom something not awful. 

somebody cares about you. that’s why these flowers are here. this night is a hug. this band is a hug. we are all here together. somebody cares.

like pissing on our territory. this may be your non-hug house, shitty nightclub, but tonight, it is OUR HOUSE.

that was the entire concept behind the brigade; the group of local fans and friends who would festoon the venue and perform in the street and the lobby. not just a show. a happening. a community. a place for everything and everyone. a grateful dead show, basically, for punks who believed in peace and face-paint.

here's a shot i love of the brigade outside the orpheum theater in boston...this is what people walked by on their way into the record release for "yes virginia". (also: it's my old house-mate casey long).

ritual heals. 

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

because i am on a plane right now, i have to interrupt this blog to point out that ash just needed some attention from me and neil, because he had originally decided that he wanted to watch “missing link”, a new children’s movie about Sasquatch that he’s relatively obsessed with. but he got about 20 minutes into the movie and said to neil: “I WANT TOY STORY THIS MOVIE HAS SOMETHING SCARY IN IT” which is ironic because about twenty minutes in he usually has to turn off toy story because the “scary toys” are more than he can handle and i sit here and realized he is four years old and so afraid of a cartoon that has frankensteined toys in it and what the fuck would happen to his heart and mind if he went to school next year and had to witness his schoolmates’ brains splashed on the floor of the classroom. 

i digress. and i don’t.

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

ritual heals.

it’s why human beings have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. the place you do the ritual is important. 

ritual is just making new memories. that’s it. that’s why we do it. we need to mark the passages of time, seal the deal, kink the rope of time, otherwise life floats along too meaninglessly and we forget what matters to us.

but what ritual, which one? how?

who gets to decide how to mourn a tragedy, a shooting, a rape, a murder, a community devastation? what’s too soon? what’s respectful?

what do we burn up or raze to the ground, when do we rip it up and start again? 

what do we paint over? 

do we burn all the sheets?

what if we can’t afford new sheets?

wave a stick of sage? buy a truck of dynamite? 

scare all the birds?

Create MORE TRAUMA with your TNT?

the refrain that echoes through every victim of trauma or grief…..

when

when 

when

when does it END?

and how?

………………………….

a few people posted on social media that they were simply not ready to go back to the bataclan after what happened.

respect.

………………………………..

the day of the show, hanging out with my parisian friends, i asked them to share their stories.

they hadn’t been back since it happened.

they were nervous.

………………………………………….

(photo by marie-alix détrie)

there’s no point in avoiding spoilers anymore, the vast majority of you have seen the show and if you’re in the UK or portugal or australia or new zealand….well, you can stop reading or you can take it all as a meta-show of endless layers and keep reading.

in the first half of my show, after talking about being sexually assaulted (and/or being nearly sexually assaulted, depending how you wanna define it at which moment, life is complicated) at 14, i talk at length about radical compassion and the boston marathon bombing. about the poem i wrote in the aftermath of the bombing, and about the grief i got from both the right-wing press and the left-wing press. 

how i felt totally alone for the first time in my life. how i stuck to my story. how i wrote a poem six years later about the hall of mirrors that poem led me down. how i posted that poem on my patreon as a paid post, giving away some of the money to the muslin justice league of boston, as the sweetest form of revenge. 

telling that story in pairs, at bataclan, felt so strange. so cinematic, as i didn’t need to say the words, but i looked out at all of the faces in the crowd and flew through time, watching the gunfire, watching them fall, watching the panic. 

………………………….

when we loaded into the venue, i noticed that there was no memorial, no plaque. (not that i could see...it turned out later that there is actually one across the street from the venue, and one small one outside. i missed them).

but by every door there was a very large and clear evacuation map, with every exit of the club clearly marked.

PLAN D’EVACUATION.

…………………………….

i opened the show on friday by walking through the back door of the venue instead of coming onto the stage to applause.

i carried my ukulele and played “in my mind” with no amplification....just walked through the crowd, going to the bar, joking with the bartenders, looking at the space from every angle. just being there. 

looking at everybody’s faces. here we are. we are all here together. 

(photo by stefanie oepen)

………………………………….

chez, my tour manager and sound engineer, who’s a touring veteran, knew nick. 

nick, the merch guy from eagles of death metal, who was shot and killed that night.

when i walked to the stage for soundcheck, she was there, setting up cables and mics at the piano. her eyes were red. 

“i’ve been crying since load-in”, she said.

she remembers seeing the news, and getting on a cruise ship to do a show for another band…floating out of the cell-signal zone before she could find out who had died….waiting two days to get back to dry land to get the news.

she talked about looking at the space, seeing the dressing rooms with the large frosted, unopen-able windows the way i saw them: with different eyes. eyes of the trapped.

……………………………………

i played the set, the dark, the abortions, the climate crisis, the dark.

(photo by stefanie oepen)

i never directly mentioned the attacks.

instead, in the second half of the show, i talked about columbine. how i wrote two songs on “who killed amanda palmer” in response to the horror. how naive we all were then, because we all assumed that columbine would be a once-in-a-lifetime horror story that would all mark and remember. not knowing it would become a monthly occurrence. not knowing it was the new normal. 

(photo by emilie tondeur)

i played “strength through music” and “guitar hero”. i pointed the gun at the piano. (someone commented on instagram that this upset them. i understand. but my finger-gun stands.)

the show is about a lot of things, but there’s one overarching theme: why, why, why, why make art. 

what is it? what is it that art makes that’s even useful or necessary?

(photo by stefanie oepen)

………………………………………………..

i recited a line from the poem i write six years after the bostom marathon bombing (and the boston marathon bombing poem-gate): "empathy is nothing".

what I want to say is harder.
what I want to say goes farther.

what I want to say is that 
we will stay crippled in the darkness
if we cannot feel compassion for the heart that is the darkest.

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

i’ve been on a steep laboratory of learning-curve i wasn’t expecting on this tour: introduction and story-telling the reframing and twisting the meaning of a song.

i’ve always known it can change everything, but this tour has been a master class in context.

try playing “judy blume” after a rape story (i did!!)

watch what happens.

try playing certain disney songs after stories about prison, abortion and miscarriage (i did!!!).

try listening to glen hansard’s “falling slowly”, bearing in mind that after he wrote that song, one of his fans committed suicide by jumping off a roof at a festival and landing in front of glen, during his set.

………………… 

(photo by emilie tondeur)

what does art make?

art makes light. it makes ritual. it gives us the thing that nothing else can give us. it gives us heart medicine. trauma medicine.

time medicine.

speaking of time…..if i had had time, i would have played a lot of songs that i couldn’t. “everybody knows somebody”, my new gun-violence ukulele song. “truce”, the ripping world grade center-/breakup-after-9/11 dresden dolls song.

“uh-merica” by regina spektor. i wish i’d had five hours. 

as it was, i did what i could. we went over twenty minutes past curfew and the venue got pissed. i’m sorry. but it was worth it to play “the ride” to that crowd.

…………………………

 as i soundchecked on friday, i watched alex setting up at the merch table.

i thought about how exposed he was. this place was so SMALL. one room.

one room.

(this is alex and emilie tondeur, who took a lot of these photos)

 ...............................

right before i went on stage, jack (my foreign tour correspondent) came up to my dressing room, with the windows you can’t escape from, to say hello, wearing a beautiful velvet gown.

is this a new find? i asked, or was it brought from london for the occasion?

i brought it, he said sheepishly. he looked ravishing.

how are you feeling? he asked.

weird. i said. i was putting on my dress shirt, then my eyeliner.

weird how? he asked. 

well, i won’t lie and say it hasn’t crossed my mind twenty or thirty times that we all might get shot tonight, even though i know that thought is totally illogical.

jack shrugged his shoulders. beyond illogical, he said. who would want to be known for committing the SECOND mass-shooting at the bataclan?

……………………………………

neil just went over to ash, because toy story is now “getting scary”.

………………………

halfway through the show.

i read from the new art book.

the bit about how the worst moments in our lives make us what we are.

(photo by emilie tondeur)

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

i kept the show going after curfew......sort of by accident. i had told the patrons that i would try to come outside to sign. but then the venue shooed us out, and i was exhausted, and i figured the night was over.

but no: there were like 200 people gathered on the sidewalk outside the front exit. i couldn’t go out the side exit or back exit of the club, which i normally would have, but there was no side exit or back exit of the club.

there was no side exit or back exit of the club.

right.

……………………………..

evacuation plan.

falling slowly.

……………………………………

i went out the front exit. alive.

everybody congratulated me. i said: i can’t sign. i’m too destroyed. but i’ll play one last song.

there was a bottle of wine.

and for a half a second i thought about playing “everybody knows somebody”, my new gun violence sing-along song. i’d had to cut it from my set because of the curfew and it had made me so sad.....

then a french man came up and hugged me.

he said: i have to thank you. every time i walk by this place it’s had a horrible memory. you’ve given me a new memory. this is what i need. 

he cried. i cried.

i hadn’t wanted to come back, a woman then said to me, handing me a letter. you made me come back. you will never know what this meant.

i stood up on a chair belonging to the adjacent cafe and i played....creep by radiohead. because that’s what was needed. because that song is a pure injection of bittersweet light into the soul-vein. it was light. we laughed. we sang. it was just silly.

i saw my aunt, my aunt sonia, who lives in the south of france and had come to paris just for the show, sonia who’s defeated cancer not once but twice.

by the grace of whatever, she is still here.

…………………

evacuation plan.

falling slowly.

and we all stood there, on the uneven sidewalk of paris under the flickering street-lights, being filmed and ogled at by passers-by, singing at the tops of our lungs.

(photo by stefanie oepen)

what the hell am i doing here, indeed.

light-makers in the dark.

there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

something’s got to be the crack, and somethings got to make the light.

find the cracks.
make the light.
make the light.
make the light.

(backstage, after the show).

……

make an evacuation plan.

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

update: ash has stopped watching “toy story” and has returned to “missing link”.....

apparently he’s ready to face the scary part.

..........

here i am with all the paris patrons a few minutes after the show.

(photo by emilie tondeur)

thank you all, for coming into the dark with me, everybody.

even if it's scary.
let's go. into the dark. together.

allons. dans le noir....tous ensemble.

love, love and love.

afp

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