Artistically Inclined

TODAY IS THE DAY! I Can Spin A Rainbow, my first original album in over four years is OUT NOW !! 

i co-wrote this record with my songwriting hero edward ka-spel (from The Legendary Pink Dots) and we are beyond excited to share it with you….head over to the official project page for everything album, download, vinyl, stories, pictures, videos, tour dates and lyrics: http://amandapalmer.net/icanspinarainbow

i just wrote an epic 5,700+ word blog about the entire project, including tons of pictures from the studio and feelings about the process. (there were lots of feelings). here’s an excerpt…..

the first exciting encounter i had with the web was getting an AOL account - but i had nobody to write to. the only other people i knew with email accounts were my goddamn parents. somehow - and i forget how - i found the pink dots bulletin board system, and coincidentally it was run by a guy from boston, alan ezust. there was a little community of people who loved the pink dots right in my home city: alan, jon whitney, who also ran the proto-band-loving website brainwashed.com, and sandy charron, a DJ at the freeform college radio station WZBC. they became my first friends-through-the-internet, and since we shared a love of the dots, our friendship deepened at shows and events, and soon we were all hanging out in real life. it was that posse that welcomed me over to alan’s house, where i actually got to “meet the band”. i wrote at length about that night in The Art of Asking (go read it), but suffice it to say, it was a life-changing one. edward listened to my first demo tape (at this point, less than twenty human beings had actually heard ANY of my songwriting - and the idea of ANYone, much less my hero, listening to my songs made me paralytic)….and he privately encouraged me to keep writing and recording. it was like getting permission from god to be a real artist. i floated on a cloud for a few weeks after that moment. i was real.

when i found out through the grapevine that the pink dots were coming through boston and needed a “place to crash” when i was about 19, i asked my parents if we could volunteer our house. they said yes (forever grateful, folks) and my first karmic contribution to the great rainbow-circle of couchsurfing was cast. jason stayed the night, we made the band eggs, my life was basically complete.

a few years later, i was studying in germany and went to see the band on tour in cologne. since i spoke fluent german, they asked if i wanted to hop in the van for a few shows and help sell CDs to the german fans. it was like being asked to run off with the circus. i ditched my university responsibilities and Got In The Van. experiencing lo-budget van touring (I LOVED IT) changed my life, and when i look back, it was the first time i really got a taste of what it meant to travel from town to town, doing the business of making music for people. i was also an epic drunk in those days…but i’ll save most of those harrowing stories for a later book. suffice it to say i humiliated myself by drunkenly shoplifting my own bands merch, a move that i carried like a shackle of extreme shame for years until i finally begged edward’s forgiveness about fifteen years after the fact. he forgave me. poor drunk amanda.

it was hamburg where we played the first night together, and can’t describe to you how fucking artistically explosive that night was for me, and for brian. i got made-up and ready early, i watched the band play their entire set, with those sparks in my heart just as strong as when i stood at edward’s feet when i was 15, and then we took stage ourselves, riding on the flame that they had lit. i still rank that show as one of the best the dresden dolls have ever played. we were on FIRE that night, lit by the fuse of history and inspiration.

and i think it was on that tour that edward and i had The First Conversation. could we make a Thing together someday? a recording of some kind, co-write music? he said yes, and i floated on a cloud for another few weeks…thinking that everything in my life really had come full circle.

some people probably fantasized about working with brian eno or bowie - i fantasized about working with my own heroes. this guy.

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“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.

Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.

Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.

Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.

It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.

The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”

There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.

Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.” 

This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet. 

Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it. 

Kansas Sen. Steve Fitzgerald compares Planned Parenthood to Nazi death camp

On March 8, Kansas Sen. Steve Fitzgerald fired off an ungrateful missive after receiving a thank you note from Planned Parenthood Great Plains. 

One of Fitzgerald’s constituents made a donation to the health care provider in the senator’s name, a donation he did not appreciate because, in his estimation, Planned Parenthood is on par with Dachau, the first death camp established in Nazi Germany.

You will be very, very sorry…. Forever.

1. set the panels

the first version is the easier but also boring for the eye, the sequence rectangular-square-square and repetitive, try to use diagonal cut, open space and vertical cut to help the movement of the story and action.2. use movement to tell the story

3. Pose, Perspective and Line density

4. Framing and Silhouettebeing the file too big it’s a link format