Town Hall: Thinging a Woodstock Pop-up/clubhouse? (Patreon)

Hello loves.

I got an idea for ya. (What's new.)

It's Town Hall time.

Short story:

I am thinking about Thing-ing a pop-up space/patron/community-clubhouse down the street from my house in Woodstock for the summer, fall and maybe further on. I am JAZZED, but scared, and I need input.

And OH....I've missed writing-writing-writing like this. I am reading all comments and taking all questions. And yes, I am doing this whilst rehearsing for the upcoming Dresden Dolls tour. A little piano, a little polling. Y'know, it's the weekend.

I could technically do this without tying it into the patreon, but the patreon funding would help a ton. 

I'm literally (well, not literally, but you know) on the fence about doing this, which is why I'm coming here. It's about the funding, yes, but also about the interest from the local and global crowd, because I will need a ton of support to lift it, and as you know, I love to start a project more than anything...and finishing is another thing. I have more backlogged video and music content than I can shake a stick at. But I also miss my old life, where I was with people and not just sitting emailing all day for work.

Before you vote, please, if you would, read my whole goddamn life story below. Thanks.

Note: that this is a patron-only post. This one's for us, loves. I'm reading all comments.

......

First off: here I am EARLY this morning with a dog watching English Footy. Leeds United vs Newcastle. Someday Someday….

Deep breath!

It's a beautiful morning here in Bearsville, New York. I'm living in a big stone house, and I love the summer and the woods but fuck, man, I miss seeing the big sky, and I miss living in a place where there's not a mass shooting every day. I miss the ocean, I miss the light. I'm deeply homesick. I'm trying to adjust to this place, but it's hard. My heart spends a lot of time just trying to stitch itself up. It's tired.

It has, no doubt, been a difficult fucking year. I am still dazed and disoriented from Two Years in New Zealand, Culture Shock, Solo momming in Covid, Divorce, The State of the World, the feeling of oncoming climate apocalypse, the rising gun violence epidemic, the acceptance of rape culture all over the fuckin place, the collapsing of abortion rights here in the states. I find myself spending a ton of time just spinning around wondering what to do. That in itself has been annoying. Writing here has helped. Being here with you has helped. A lot. Here is my safety net, my salvation in many ways.

Before this year - well, it has also been a difficult three years. That shit was epic, mate. I lost my life. I lost my life and made a new one.

I made a new one from scratch in another country. I still can't believe that happened. I can't. My entire family changed shape, I experienced and witnessed some unfathomable weirdness over on that little island, and so much of that went down behind tightly locked doors. For someone who has spent her life in community, feeling the support of a crowd, sharing the story as I went along, that was a circle of hell I never, ever want to enter again. I emerge from the dark, mangled, feeling phantom limbs everywhere. I feel like a clam with no shell.

And let's face it, eh? It has actually been a difficult dozen or so years. I have been stumbling in all sorts of ways since around, oh, the time my first solo record came out. In many ways, I've never found my footing since then, and like I said in this last post, my voice, my self, the person I love, the woman connected to the world...she kind of faded away, went missing bit by bit. I'm wondering how I'm supposed to find her, revive her, welcome her back to earth and out from under the rubble of the past.

If you know me, you know I like to do all sorts of ... things.

One of the things I love to do is to BE in community. To create theater in life, to make place and space for people to feel awe and delight. I came from a theater background and loved the world of performance art, I never really belonged in "music" world.

I wrote and sang songs, but I spoke fluent Theater Weirdo. I always had more in common with the Theater Nerds than the Music Nerds, and I find that it's still true: my best friends are the bilingual Theater-ese and Music-ese peeps.

Theater was about the gathering, about making the ordinary world literally look different. THE BUSINESS OF SHOW. Show me something unexpected. Show me something to change my insides. Make me see the world - this place, this space - in a totally different way. Theater is about transforming the actual physical STUFF around us into something different. I love this world, and I love decorating and painting right on it. Not just within the confines of an actual THEATER THEATER, but everywhere. That's why street performance meant so much to me. I loved transforming the ordinary into the magical. It was my joy.

I wrote a little bit about this in The Art of Asking, but one of my true joys in my twenties - right around the start of The Dresden Dolls - was hosting huge, mad, life-giving and mind-bending salon/parties in the art collective where I lived, The Cloud Club. The parties were part concert, part theater, part speakeasy, and I honestly, in many ways, can't remember happier times in my life than those nights, feeling like I was fully myself, in touch with the universe, making a welcoming and surprising space for my art friends, and my workaday friends. Making the magic of togetherness.

Making a scene. Making whooaaaa and ahHHhh!! Aria installed in the bathroom bathtub in a white dress surrounded by chia seeds, wet and white-faced and pretending to be asleep, Andrew dressed as an mobster cooking pasta for everyone in the kitchen and putting on a full Italian accent, a noise band from Providence Rhode Island about to play in the back garden while upstairs by the fire, a cellist I'd introduced to a dancer performing by flashlight in a corner of one of the empty apartments to whoever was assembled up there. I loved this more than anything. Pouring drinks. Introducing people.

Meeting Brian. Brian came to one of these parties - my parties were actually the connecting point of the Dresden Dolls - then the tissue. Once we met, the whole thing exploded: the dolls started playing the parties. At that point, it went OFF. But it also fell apart. I, the hostess, left the building. I went on tour. I didn't take the time or energy anymore to nurture these art parties, I was too busy going off and being famous. It didn't make any sense anymore to invite people to the house, the dolls fanbase had gotten too big, and inviting just anybody into my house - my literal kitchen and bedroom - well, it wasn't sustainable.

Then the band toured and toured and toured. We toured nearly non-stop from 2003-2007. I made party-feeling where I could, where I was. That was The Brigade. The Brigade was my solution to missing the feeling of art-party as the Dresden Dolls toured the globe. I wanted to keep feeling like a surprising hostess who could draw out the local talent and connect some dots and surprise and delight people who came to our shows not expecting to see a painted person with a typewriter in the bathroom of the theater. It worked, it was a way to be host-connector-Amanda and also singer-songwriter-performer.

And if you've been around since the beginning of the patreon, you know that I've taken a wide, creative berth in the Thinging of Things.

This patreon is kind of an exercise in creative art and money hacking.

Most people who have a patreon just charge by the month. Patrons give a certain amount of money per month like clockwork and the creator just creates and in the money flows.

I chose to follow the "per thing" route, back in the day when I started this whole bananas enterprise, and that meant that I HAD to create something every month (even if it was just a newsletter - aka The Althing) in order to feel justified in taking your hard-earned monies. I asked - many moons ago - for permission to use this hack, and everyone agreed that it was a fine hack indeed. So during months where I had very little to release, I would still have enough dough to cover the costs of running the Business That is AFP - paying the basic bills, paying the office rent, paying the staff, it could all get covered even if I didn't have a song, a video, a podcast or a poem in the pipeline. This has worked just fine.

Most people have their pledges capped, anyway, and so everyone, for the most part, has been very trusting and generous insofar as what constitutes an offering. Mostly - like I said in The Art of Asking - crowdfunding is more about general trust, connection, and a wider feeling of exchange than just a dollar for a song or $10 for an album (what even IS that nowadays).

Over the years, I've come to you with permission-based ideas: is it ok to thing a newsletter? A poem? An event? Time and time again you've more or less said: just go for it, whatever feels right to you, artist. We are here to support.In general, usually only about 10-20% of the patrons even vote in these polls, leading me to believe that a lot of the patrons just have their patronage set to stun, and don;'t even read the majority of posts I write, anyway. WHICH IS FINE with me. I support over 100 artists on patreon and if I am being honest, I read about 1% of the content, I'm just....happy to support. I like the fact that I'm there, like clockwork, giving Geeta money for her jouranlism/writing, Ben for his song-making, giving Einstürzende Neubauten money for their avant-noise-making, and so on and so forth. I know enough to know that my dollars just let them ... DO their THING.

This one is a little different, and so I'm coming, once again, to town hall you and have a discussion.

Since I came back to the USA last summer - almost a year ago, gulp - I have been really...well, disoriented is a good way to put it.

For a couple years, Neil and I lived in this house, together, in Woodstock, NY. A town in which I had no history, no connection, no friends. Don't ask how we wound up here, that's a long-ass story for another day.

It was, for a long time, just a place to land between trips, a place to stash boxes, and the place from which I was going to figure out where to go next. I never really planned to stay.

Then I had a baby. I decided to stay. In 2019, I had a plan. A plan! A PLAN!!! The plan was to arrive back here in this house in March 2020, exhausted from tour, and rest. I was going to rest, live in this house with my husband, put the kiddo in school, work on my marriage and vegetable garden, and try to make a nice, normal fucking life.

That didn't happen.

After all the covid madness, I wound up living in this house alone, wondering how in hell's name I wound up in a small town in upstate New York with few friends, far from my old community in Boston, far from my community in New York City, and far, far, far from myself.

I struggled, a lot, to accept that this was really my fate.

Alone in a house in the woods. This was not the fucking plan. I tried to take a deep breath, tried not miss New Zealand too much, and tried to make a go of it. I got back in June. I tried to move in. I got covid. I managed to get ASh into school and start organizing a kitchen. I figured I'd be making constant trips to Boston and New York, staying connected with all that I knew and loved, and everything would be jolly. I have found that...that hasn't happened much.

Co-parenting a child in the woods and doing the Basic Mom routine has meant that my movement is severely limited (all parent understand this: once your kid is school-age, wandering around constantly is a pain in the ass) and so I pondered plan B: maybe my friends would come to me...in the woods. This has worked...sort of. Half the time, my house is filled with jovial sounds, wayfaring musician pals wanting to break bread with me and Ash, they like escaping the noise of the city, and I haven't been TOO alone, except when I am. When I am, the noise is deafening.

I learned this in New Zealand: some places are just not huge cities or thoroughfares busting with multi-cultural events every day. WHO KNEW. Go figure. Some places do not have a constant tap of art, theater, culture and activities for old and young that you can turn on like a faucet. This also gave me an appreciation for all the kids who used to drive eight hours to see the Dresden Dolls in like, Salt Lake City, who would tell me they lived in a literal culture DESERT. And I kind of didn't understand. I mean, there's always SOMETHING going on. Unless...there's not. I had never lived somewhere where there was not a fuck ton going on all the time.

Just to meander, because I am clearly on a spontaneous coffee-fueled writing spree here so what the fuck: I remember once of the first weekends I was out of Covid Lockdown, alone in Havelock North, New Zealand, with Ash, and it was raining. It was a Sunday. That's FINE, I thought, we will go to ... the library! The library was closed. An art museum? There were none. A puppet show? There were none. Ok, the MOVIES? The local movie theater was playing only shit movies. I was so sad. I searched and searched. We went to the aquarium. The next Sunday, it rained again. We went to the aquarium again. It was then that I realized how deeply, fucking truly deeply, I missed New York City. And Boston. And Melbourne. And all the other places that had LOTS OF THINGS TO DO. I figured that this would change drastically when we came back to Woodstock. Instead, I found that rural Woodstock, New York, was a lot like rural New Zealand. There was just NOT a shit ton to do.

One thing I found myself realizing was that there was not a good community cafe or hang space. A place where you could just roll in, get a coffee, maybe listen to someone playing the guitar, maybe sit by a fire, with a cosy corner for a kid to draw and read books with other kids. A punk-rock pub sorta thing. I've toured the world endlessly. These places exist. Or existed, once. I know because I've been in them. Places with ragged oriental rugs, rickety bookshelves, lamps, little stages, flyers on the wall for all the things on offer in the town. Bohemian meeting places.

I could not believe that of all the places on earth to be missing an ingredient like this, it'd be Woodstock, home of the hippies. But no, there's nothing like that here. There's a few little restaurants and coffee shops, but nothing that had that feeling of Second Home for the Weirdos. I have commented on this endlessly to thte locals, and they all agree. It is a strange hole in the market.

There are also TONS of new people in town.

During the pandemic, there were points where real estate in Woodstock went up THIRTY-FIVE PERCENT. A ton of locals sold and moved out. A ton of people got into the Air BNB business. A ton of people from NY city - people with kids and people who could work remote - left their shoebox apartments and decided to try to make a go of it up here in the woods. (If you want a hilarious read, may I recommend this piss-take in the New Yorker about this).

This all has meant that the community here is CHANGING, rapidly. Everything feels unstable and up for grabs. The locals are grumpy, the new people are emotionally fragile and confused, everything feels wonky.

I just googled "Fantasy Coffeehouse" and found this image of a place in Anaheim, California....

YES.

I'm thinking about the old Pink Pony in New York. (RIP).

And this one.

MMMMMMMMMMMM.

This is more of less what I think of when I think of heaven. I salivate.

As a person who has toured for a living for so many years, cosy coffeeshops and flotsam-and-jetsam community spaces have been my second home. (Maybe even my first home. Nobody wants to call a tour bus or a shit airport hotel their first home).

Cut to:

I'm talking with my Woodstock neighbor, Andy Animal (yes, you got that right) who runs Tinker Street Cinema down the road (some of you have joined me there for random film nights). He told me that an old tavern was for rent in downtown Woodstock, and someone had been using it for a pop-up, but left. I'd been in there, I knew the joint. I knew the space was magical, and from the sounds of it, the rent was really cheap. I allowed myself to fantasize, and I called the landlord. Well, the rent was NOT cheap, but now I was fucked, because now I HAD A FANTASY.

And now, I want to tell you the fantasy.

I would like to rent this old tavern, and turn it into a pop-up venue/gallery/coffeeshop/salon/community artspace/clubhouse for a while. For patrons, and for the public. A place where we can BE, muse, hang, meet, sing, poem, make, read, play. A place for reading, drinking, listening, and talking.

A place to heal a little bit of the time-space-feeling rift left in the covid-wake.

Now, here's the obvious rub. The space, at the outset, will break even at best, and probably not even that. I think if I THING it as the third thing of the month, we can just barely cover the rent an electricity.

But I wanna do it.

I especially wanna do it because summer is coming, I will barely be leaving the Woodstock area, and I want to VIBE. I want a place that me and my local and faraway friends and moms and kids and weirdos can stretch our creative brains. I'm thinking spontaneous ukulele shows for patrons, webcasts, open mic nights, poetry readings, piano musical theater sing-alongs, gallery openings, drag queen story hour for the kids, painting parties, wine parties, coffee hours, book swaps, visible mending sewing circles, aikido classes, anarchic knitting circles, and best of all, JUST A PLACE TO MEET UP AND BE TOGETHER.

I will happily do patron-only meet-ups, and I don't even have to be there all the time. It can just be a central locale for everyone else to find everyone else. We can have open webcasts where patrons can chat with other patrons from around the globe, live, with not everybody stuck in the screen-box. I also love the idea of having patrons bringing their own art, objects, writing, and creativity to the space. I love the idea of a wall we all decorate. A shrine we all contribute to. Think burning man, with no burning. Think potluck, but art-luck.

I also have some exciting news, hidden down here in the meat of the post, which is that The Dresden Dolls are going to be doing ANOTHER residency here in Woodstock towards the end of the summer.

I fantasize that this place will be our dolls-y gathering spot, our Kit Kat Klub, our Xanadu, our clubhouse, our just-for-us place. To have hundreds/thousands of Dolls fans descending on Woodstock again and being able to give them a place to go during the day and before/after the shows gives me tingles. I was sad seeing all the Dolls fans wandering around town not really sure where to eat, where to drink, where to breakfast, where to find one another. It's sort of like having a mini-festival instead of just a residency. We can set up places for dolls-people to share their own ideas, wares, books, music, things, a Punk Cabaret Art Farmer's Market.

There's a plaaaaace for us.

Can you tell I'm excited? I am excited.

And I haven't BEEN excited like this for a very long time, and just the feeling of being excited about something, anything, is exciting, and that is why I am excited.

I have a handful of people ready to HELP me do this if we undertake, because as you know, I am busy busy busy....trying to write, trying to catch up, trying to run my business, trying to raise a kid, trying to finish up a chapter of my life and start a new one. There's a part of Adult Me that is rolling her eyes and saying...this is not the time for this, distracted child. But I also know what this will feed. It'll feed the mother in me that needs a place for her kid to find magic and community, it'll feed the writer in me who wants to throw new songs at the wall the day I write them, it'll feed the hungry heart who has been wondering how she is going to survive in a town that hosts a lot of Grateful Dead cover bands (no disrespect, but I'm over it), but not a ton of avant-garde Drag Queens. I miss my weirdos. Maybe they'll come to the woods. Maybe this will fix it all.

Now, now, now: OK.

I want to talk about the vote, because in my experience, y'all are generally yes yes yes about everything. We are talking a total of tens of thousands of dollars here if I thing this for the next three or four months, so I don't take it lightly.

Not everyone is IN upstate New York, or even NEAR upstate New York. This is kind of a local undertaking. I mean, you can fly in from Sydney, it's true. You could make a pilgrimage.

This is where it gets weird. If you're a patron in Alaska or Amsterdam, you may be thinking: THIS IS NOT FAIR. And I suppose it's true. To be funding a pop-up venue in which you cannot drink coffee or wine. I suppose the answer to that needs to be: we will try to involve you in the joy of this, and if you know me, you know I'm pretty creative. Maybe you can look at it as a therapeutic funding exercise to help your artist, Amanda, who is sad and lonely in the woods and just needs a canvas on which to commune, and there's a nice byproduct of helping all the other locals in need of local grunge-glitter-house.

So also, if you're like FUCK THIS, you can always cap your pledge at two things for the next few months.

We can see if it works and brings you joy just through the posts and the joy it brings to the rest of the local community. I also have fantasies that once it gets off the ground - if it gets off the ground - and starts making it's own money, it no longer needs to be Thinged. The Thinging is maybe just a booster, a runway. I also know that a place like this could potentially - someday- be run as a non-profit. That's so faraway I can't even think about it. I am also wondering what we can do with the local non-profits right in the area, the domestic violence shelter to be sure, to fundraise on the side if there's enough goodwill and overflow. I am wondering how it will work to make most events pay-what-you-can if the basic rent and costs are covered. I am thinking about one of my favorite concept restaurants in Australia, Lentil as Anything, a fully pay-what-you-can restaurant that actually worked, because people got the concept and CARED. I am thinking that I won't know until I try.

Or, for real: you can tell me in the poll that you think this is nuts and that this is really not A Thingable Thing. That is FAIR.

Even if you don't think this is thing-able, and I Do Not Thing, I'm still probably going to rent this joint and pop it the fuck up, because I'm salivating and fantasizing and lonely for gringe-glitter-community-land, and I'll just need to do some more fancy financial footwork to Thing adjacent projects in order to cover the rent. It'll probably still work. But my lord, it'll be a fucking pleasure and a revolution to be able to say that this place is truly community-supported, and if you know me, I'll try to make it as explosively Worth It as possible. It's certainly an experiment I've never tried before.

I also want to know, if you are local, what you might wanna contribute to the space, see happen in the space, WANT to happen in the space. It will be OURS. Go mad with ideas. I want to share. It's not HUGE. It only fits about 50+ people. But that's enough. I think.

And like I said above, the worst thing that happens is that I rent a pop-up space for a few months, don't have the bandwidth to run it right, and I lose a few grand.

It's maybe just worth the risk.

I need to make the call on this relatively quickly, so go on, tell me....whaddaya think, please comment openly. I am reading everything.

xx

A

———THE STUFF I PASTE AT THE END OF THE POST———

1. if you are a patron and new to my work, don’t forget your patronage allows you access to ALL of my patreon releases to date. HERE is the link to download my latest big solo record, “There Will Be No Intermission”, and HERE is a link to download the PDF of the art/essay book that goes with it.

2. if you’re a patron reading this post via an email notification, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol. that's always nice for me to see, so i know who's reading.

3. see All the Things (over 200 of them) i've made so far on patreon:

http://amandapalmer.net/things

4. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

5. are you new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

6. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net

2023 Tour Dates:

***THE DRESDEN DOLLS***

May 19th, 20th, & 21st - Denver, CO - Ophelia's Electric Soapbox *SOLD OUT*

May 26th, 27th, & 28th - Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf *SOLD OUT*

June 16th, 17th, & 18th - Orlando, FL - The Social *SOLD OUT*

June 23rd, 24th, & 25th - New Orleans, LA - Toulouse Theatre *SOLD OUT*

All tickets and waiting list for tickets at: https://amandapalmer.net/events/