You Must Go and Win: Essays (11 page)
Read You Must Go and Win: Essays Online
Authors: Alina Simone
No, I thought, as I watched myself loudly debating the pluses
and minuses of various camera angles with Amanda, pointing first at the stone-faced grotto, then at a row of nearby pews.
No!
But yes, in the next shot there is Amanda, emerging from the backseat of the Volvo in her wedding dress, black wig slightly askew. She checks her makeup in the window of the station wagon one last time before grabbing the milk crate and setting off for the shrine, a dirty bride’s veil trailing several feet behind her. Amanda sets up in front of the statue of the Blessed Mother, at the base of the grotto. The words “I am the Immaculate Conception” hover above her head in a gold halo. She gets up on her milk crate, bows her head, and assumes a prayerful pose.
What is wrong with you?
I screamed silently at myself.
Put that fucking tripod away!
The shrine was not only a site of religious pilgrimage, it was also home to an order of nuns, the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity. Did we ever stop to think what might happen if one of them chanced by and found us there? But I had a feeling that even if John the Baptist himself had dropped in for a flagon of holy water, in our supreme arrogance we wouldn’t have stopped filming.
and minuses of various camera angles with Amanda, pointing first at the stone-faced grotto, then at a row of nearby pews.
No!
But yes, in the next shot there is Amanda, emerging from the backseat of the Volvo in her wedding dress, black wig slightly askew. She checks her makeup in the window of the station wagon one last time before grabbing the milk crate and setting off for the shrine, a dirty bride’s veil trailing several feet behind her. Amanda sets up in front of the statue of the Blessed Mother, at the base of the grotto. The words “I am the Immaculate Conception” hover above her head in a gold halo. She gets up on her milk crate, bows her head, and assumes a prayerful pose.
What is wrong with you?
I screamed silently at myself.
Put that fucking tripod away!
The shrine was not only a site of religious pilgrimage, it was also home to an order of nuns, the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity. Did we ever stop to think what might happen if one of them chanced by and found us there? But I had a feeling that even if John the Baptist himself had dropped in for a flagon of holy water, in our supreme arrogance we wouldn’t have stopped filming.
We kept pressing west, putting things where they didn’t belong. There is the Eight Foot Bride, blending in as one of the ears in a field of concrete corn sculptures in Dublin, Ohio; in a forest in Hell, Michigan; wedged between a griffin and a white-robed goddess at the Lawn Ornament Capital of the World in Lenox, Michigan; standing on the dusty floor of an abandoned farmhouse we find off the highway somewhere in Illinois. The cops finally catch up with us in Indiana, where we are filming Amanda on the railroad tracks running alongside I-65. Someone had called the police from their cell phone to report that a bride was trying to commit suicide. They laugh at us and let us go, and when the footage starts up again, I have no idea where we are.
The opening shot is a shaky close-up of a cup filled with what looks like dirty bong water. It turns out to be coffee. We are at a diner eating breakfast and yet it is clearly nighttime, the sky outside the windows is dark, punctuated only by the acid glow of distant streetlamps. Wan plants dangle from the acoustic ceiling tiles. The table is covered with loads of food—home fries and eggs under a layer of cheese that looks as natural as vinyl flooring. We are salting it liberally. A man with close-cropped hair sits across from us. His arms are covered in tattoos and he is wearing a crucifix over a sweatshirt that says FLORIDA in big red letters. But I know we are not in Florida either.
“Why are you here and where are you going and who are you?” the man is asking Amanda.
“Thas sree quessions,” Amanda says through a mouthful of potatoes. “Ass one.”
“Okay,” the man says. “I’ll ask the most important one. Who are you?”
Now I remembered. The car had broken down. We were in the Midwest somewhere. We’d gone looking for a mechanic earlier, but couldn’t find one and had to wait until morning.
“I’m Amanda Palmer,” Amanda says, and then adds, smiling through her food, “Narcissist.”
But I must have filmed something besides this march of determined
weirdness: Amanda as the Eight Foot Bride on the balcony of a castle made of tinfoil in Florida, Amanda’s veil illuminated in the ghastly half-light of an underpass in Montreal, Amanda bisecting the O of a giant illuminated sign spelling HOPE on the lawn of a suburban church in Michigan. I recalled that vague period of time between our first road trip and our second, when Amanda suddenly started taking songwriting more seriously. There were fewer dreamy walks spent airbrushing the days of some ill-defined future. Now the talk was of concrete plans. The band she was forming. The shows she was playing.
weirdness: Amanda as the Eight Foot Bride on the balcony of a castle made of tinfoil in Florida, Amanda’s veil illuminated in the ghastly half-light of an underpass in Montreal, Amanda bisecting the O of a giant illuminated sign spelling HOPE on the lawn of a suburban church in Michigan. I recalled that vague period of time between our first road trip and our second, when Amanda suddenly started taking songwriting more seriously. There were fewer dreamy walks spent airbrushing the days of some ill-defined future. Now the talk was of concrete plans. The band she was forming. The shows she was playing.
I searched through the box of tapes until the dust made my fingers itch, but I found what I was looking for. We are back in the parlor of Amanda’s parents’ house in Lexington, and I am facing Amanda at the piano, in the same spot where I sat through countless rehearsals of
On Their Own.
A year has passed since our first road trip. Now Amanda is living in a low-rent artists’ complex called the Cloud Club and she’s started playing shows at the smaller clubs around Cambridge. During that same span of time, I had gotten a second cat and continued working as the director of special projects. Amanda wants to play me a new song she just wrote that she’s clearly excited about. I must have come over first thing in the morning, because her purple hair is mussed and she is wearing a t-shirt and shorts that look slept in. Soon she is hitting the keys so hard that every note is accompanied by the heavy
klung
of ivory slamming wood. The veins in Amanda’s neck are bulging and her gaze is turned inward. It’s a good song, but I don’t seem to be listening. Or maybe the spectacle makes me uncomfortable. Either way, the camera drifts away. It spends a while bobbing around the room like a drunk mosquito, before finally coming to rest on a light fixture overhead, where it stays until the end of the song.
On Their Own.
A year has passed since our first road trip. Now Amanda is living in a low-rent artists’ complex called the Cloud Club and she’s started playing shows at the smaller clubs around Cambridge. During that same span of time, I had gotten a second cat and continued working as the director of special projects. Amanda wants to play me a new song she just wrote that she’s clearly excited about. I must have come over first thing in the morning, because her purple hair is mussed and she is wearing a t-shirt and shorts that look slept in. Soon she is hitting the keys so hard that every note is accompanied by the heavy
klung
of ivory slamming wood. The veins in Amanda’s neck are bulging and her gaze is turned inward. It’s a good song, but I don’t seem to be listening. Or maybe the spectacle makes me uncomfortable. Either way, the camera drifts away. It spends a while bobbing around the room like a drunk mosquito, before finally coming to rest on a light fixture overhead, where it stays until the end of the song.
And then there is some footage of one of Amanda’s first
shows. I recognize the place. We’re at Zeitgeist, a tiny art gallery that used to be two blocks from my grandmother’s apartment. The place has been shuttered for years, plywood nailed over the windows and painted black. I still drive by it every time I go home to visit. Amanda is dressed up like a Claymation figure from a Tim Burton movie, with black curlicues painted around her eyes in a spidery hand. The cellist that she may or may not still have been sleeping with at that point is on stage too, his hair in pigtails. There are maybe ten of us in the audience, arranged on a smattering of folding chairs, but from the way Amanda carries herself, you’d think this is Madison Square Garden. Everything about the way she moves—the exaggerated arc of her wrist hovering above the keyboard, a single finger dropping to a high C like a hungry bird plunging into water—has a mysterious weight to it that commands attention. But because the gallery is completely dark I have the camera in night-vision mode, which turns Amanda an unfortunate shade of radioactive green and her eyes into zombified laser beams. Also distracting were the two friends I’d brought with me, people who wouldn’t have enjoyed this kind of music under the best of circumstances and could barely contain their eye-rolling. As soon as we are back out on the sidewalk one of them turns to me, pushing his big green face into the camera.
shows. I recognize the place. We’re at Zeitgeist, a tiny art gallery that used to be two blocks from my grandmother’s apartment. The place has been shuttered for years, plywood nailed over the windows and painted black. I still drive by it every time I go home to visit. Amanda is dressed up like a Claymation figure from a Tim Burton movie, with black curlicues painted around her eyes in a spidery hand. The cellist that she may or may not still have been sleeping with at that point is on stage too, his hair in pigtails. There are maybe ten of us in the audience, arranged on a smattering of folding chairs, but from the way Amanda carries herself, you’d think this is Madison Square Garden. Everything about the way she moves—the exaggerated arc of her wrist hovering above the keyboard, a single finger dropping to a high C like a hungry bird plunging into water—has a mysterious weight to it that commands attention. But because the gallery is completely dark I have the camera in night-vision mode, which turns Amanda an unfortunate shade of radioactive green and her eyes into zombified laser beams. Also distracting were the two friends I’d brought with me, people who wouldn’t have enjoyed this kind of music under the best of circumstances and could barely contain their eye-rolling. As soon as we are back out on the sidewalk one of them turns to me, pushing his big green face into the camera.
“That SUCKED!” he yells. And then there is just the sound of my laughter, echoing greenly down the empty street.
Finally there is this, an interview on a beach somewhere on the southeastern seaboard. Amanda has just returned from peeing in the ocean and now we are lying down on the sand, where she shades her eyes from the midday sun, framed by the wind-whipped ocean and a shore drained of color. We are talking about work.
“What do you say when people ask you what you do?” my disembodied voice asks from behind the camera.
“The answer really depends on who’s asking me. Generally I tell them that I’m a mime for a living, but I’m really just supporting myself as a musician with street theater.”
“You seem so immune from the outward pressure to get a normal job. Could you talk more about that?”
“I’m just against doing something for someone else for money that I don’t care about—I think most people are. I don’t think that’s so strange.”
“But
most
people do it …” I prod.
most
people do it …” I prod.
“I don’t want to get down on people,” Amanda begins, shifting to one elbow, “but I think there are hundreds of creative ways to make money and people are just not into exploring them. I like not having to depend on anyone. You are totally responsible. If it fails, it fails—and that’s fine. You do what you want to do. If you want to make X amount of money you obviously have to put in X amount of effort, and I like things that way. It’s simple. I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be working in an office and be totally productive or nonproductive and still get your twelve-fifty an hour. That must feel
fucking awful
.”
fucking awful
.”
Twelve-fifty an hour, at the time, was fifty cents more than I was making directing special projects—none of them my own. And the thing Amanda didn’t realize was that the frustrated office people, the ones not exploring making money in nonconventional ways, the ones feeling fucking awful, were me. And the thing I didn’t realize at that moment, lying on the beach, was that the conversation I was having with Amanda was actually a conversation I was having with myself. It
did
sound so simple when Amanda put things that way. Knowing what you want and then doing it. Cause and effect. Effort equals outcome. Then what was it that stopped me from even trying?
did
sound so simple when Amanda put things that way. Knowing what you want and then doing it. Cause and effect. Effort equals outcome. Then what was it that stopped me from even trying?
“So what would your ideal job be?” I hear myself ask in a strained voice.
“I’d like to make my money putting out CDs and touring,” Amanda replies in the same even tone. “The ultimate goal is to become an icon … I don’t really even have to be
famous
famous. I wouldn’t even mind being a small-time icon, as long as I was a little icon somewhere. I would like ‘Amanda Palmer’ to be indicative of something.” She stares up at the sky for a moment, then adds, “That would be nice.”
famous
famous. I wouldn’t even mind being a small-time icon, as long as I was a little icon somewhere. I would like ‘Amanda Palmer’ to be indicative of something.” She stares up at the sky for a moment, then adds, “That would be nice.”
“Why do you want that?” I sputter. “I mean, it just seems so … so … outwardly focused.”
“Well you
asked
me how I wanted to make my living,” says Amanda, still nonplussed. “I mean, that’s not
all
I want out of life. I’d just rather make my living that way than doing street theater.”
asked
me how I wanted to make my living,” says Amanda, still nonplussed. “I mean, that’s not
all
I want out of life. I’d just rather make my living that way than doing street theater.”
“But … okay, let’s talk about the icon thing … It seems like you want to capitalize on this narcissistic aspect of yourself—”
“Yes, but I think it’s possible to be an icon and not just be an attention-grabbing fuck. The way I’ve noticed things work, even on a small scale, is there’s just certain people that like having that … that experience. Just experiencing someone who is singing and dancing. And there are no hidden agendas in that if you get it right. I have my own very, very small little core of fans who like what I do. They just like to watch me. Even when I’m not playing the piano—they think that my life is neat and exciting, and even if they have their own neat and exciting lives, they like to follow mine, they get off on it. And I get off on them getting off on it. It’s not a situation where I’m demanding their attention, I just know they like to watch me and I like to perform and there’s a nice little synchronicity there. And I think that could work on a larger scale for everybody’s benefit, not just mine.” And with that Amanda calmly excuses herself to go put on some more sunscreen and I start fidgeting angrily with the camera controls, turning her into a pastel cartoon.
What was extraordinary to me about this scene, nine years later, was not how bitter and lost and full of schadenfreude I was—I already knew this about myself, perhaps even then—but how perfectly Amanda predicted her own future. Our conversation on the beach took place years before she started her band, the Dresden Dolls, before they signed to a major label and toured with Nine Inch Nails, before she sold a couple hundred thousand albums and played sold-out solo shows from Sydney to Japan to London, before she created an original play for the American Repertory Theater, performed with the Boston Pops, published two books, or amassed so many fans that she could earn $19,000 in ten hours by sitting on her sofa and auctioning off her stockings, her glass dildo, her ukulele, and her empty wine bottles online. And yet, even back then, before any of that, she still
knew
. Regardless of whatever else was going on, in a tutu or a torn wedding gown, from the balcony of a tinfoil palace or deep in the forests of Hell, she already had the answer to those three fundamental questions, the ones some nameless man in some placeless place is always there to ask: Who are you? Where are you going? And why are you here?
knew
. Regardless of whatever else was going on, in a tutu or a torn wedding gown, from the balcony of a tinfoil palace or deep in the forests of Hell, she already had the answer to those three fundamental questions, the ones some nameless man in some placeless place is always there to ask: Who are you? Where are you going? And why are you here?
I don’t have the tape from the last time I filmed Amanda, because there is no tape. A heavy hand on my shoulder stopped me before I could even start filming. I was living in Hoboken then and the Dresden Dolls were playing their first show on the main stage of the Knitting Factory in Manhattan. The show was starting in just a few minutes and I was in the middle of adjusting my tripod when the bouncer interrupted me.
“Sorry, you can’t film in here,” he said, putting a hand in front of the lens.
“Oh, don’t worry—she’s a friend of mine.” I smiled. “I have Amanda’s permission.” I had to stare up at the man as I said this—he was mountainous.
“I don’t think you understand,” the bouncer continued without removing his hand. “You don’t have prior authorization to shoot in here.”
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