I went to Amanda Palmer's "ninja gig" in Warsaw tonight, and it was a fascinating experience. It took place at Powiększenie, which is a club near Nowy Swiat, in downtown Warsaw. It was basically Amanda passing time - until Neil (Gaiman) finished his book signing and took her out to dinner - by rambling hilariously about anything and everything (including Lady Gaga, her visit to Australia, and her attitude towards drugs) and playing some songs on a ukulele.
(Cue the story of the ukulele, which I need as foreshadowing: she bought it just for laughs, but then it turned out to be very useful, because she didn't have to lug around a keyboard everywhere, and could just do these gigs with a ukulele. She can't really play it, only knows 7 chords (but not what they're called), and refuses to learn more because then she would be a "ukulele player", and nobody wants to be that. Also, even though she got it 2 years ago for 19 bucks, and it's always a bit out of tune, she won't buy a proper one "the same way really beautiful people sometimes insist on staying fat so no one will love them". She only knows how to play about 4 songs on it, including Radiohead's Creep, which she learned for a corporate showcase of her album, because she figured people would find it charming. And they did.)
I had a great time, laughed my ass off throughout, and wished she would just sit there telling stories all night long. She actually made a comment about Henry Rollins doing just that, deciding at some point that he's just gonna do tours being Henry Rollins, and people going "yeah, ok". Apparently there's already some footage up on youtube, so here are her musings on Lady Gaga in song format (she meant to write a blog entry about it, but couldn't make it work, so she wrote a song instead. She hasn't memorized it yet, so she's reading the lyrics off her iphone, which is being held up by an audience member - hence the "scroll..." plea towards the end):
And now for the part where I try to wrangle my - still quite nebulous at this point - impressions into some sort of cohesive... thing. Basically: Amanda Palmer doesn't really have a stage persona. I'm not saying she's not charismatic - she oozes charisma. I mean it in the sense of a filter, a screen separating her from the audience. She essentially wears her heart on her sleeve, and seems to telegraph everything that's going through her head, either consciously or subconsciously, and in this case - mostly self-consciously. It's a bit tricky when you're a performer, because you're relied on to shoulder the show, to put on a brave face and soldier on, no matter what. And that, in turn, is tricky when you're doing a spur of the moment, guerilla gig, and the audience doesn't deliver the requisite spontaneity. There's a real fragility to these transient, unscripted moments, and I suppose it's very easy to suddenly find yourself sprinting in place, several feet off that cliff, cartoon coyote style, desperately trying to keep the illusion going.
Well, this time the audience did not deliver, as people verged from non-responsive to embarassing, and the place seemed to put her in a different mindframe too. From what she said, the way these ninja gigs usually work is she posts online that she's going to be at a particular location (usually al fresco), people show up, she fucks around with the ukulele, and everybody has a laugh. This was the first one organized in an actual music venue, with a stage, an audience, and proper sound equipment. As time wore on, she seemed to grow more and more self-conscious about fucking up chords on the ukulele, and not giving people a "proper" musical experience. She kept saying how now she has to come back and do a proper show, because this way she can't show us what she actually does, which is play the piano well and perform her own music. And that this was just her being charming. The real "moment of truth", in my opinion, came at the end of the show. She reluctantly did a request (cringing about butchering the song on the ukulele), and after the applause died down, she said it was a really weird ninja gig ending, and probably the most anti-climactic one ever. Then, as people were starting to get up, she asked if she could just do one last, short song. And played Creep - i.e. one of the only songs she actually can do on the ukulele. And she really belted it out, gave an awesome performance, as if trying to say: "Look people, I really know how to do this. REALLY. Ok?"
Feeling complicit and co-responsible for a performance is a rather odd, and not entirely pleasant sensation, especially when you have nothing to bring to the table (I was too inhibited to ask what her attitude towards slaying vampires was during the Q&A session), but at the same time, I left the club adoring Amanda Palmer to bits and wishing there were more people like her in the world, so hey... maybe that was the plan all along?
(Cue the story of the ukulele, which I need as foreshadowing: she bought it just for laughs, but then it turned out to be very useful, because she didn't have to lug around a keyboard everywhere, and could just do these gigs with a ukulele. She can't really play it, only knows 7 chords (but not what they're called), and refuses to learn more because then she would be a "ukulele player", and nobody wants to be that. Also, even though she got it 2 years ago for 19 bucks, and it's always a bit out of tune, she won't buy a proper one "the same way really beautiful people sometimes insist on staying fat so no one will love them". She only knows how to play about 4 songs on it, including Radiohead's Creep, which she learned for a corporate showcase of her album, because she figured people would find it charming. And they did.)
I had a great time, laughed my ass off throughout, and wished she would just sit there telling stories all night long. She actually made a comment about Henry Rollins doing just that, deciding at some point that he's just gonna do tours being Henry Rollins, and people going "yeah, ok". Apparently there's already some footage up on youtube, so here are her musings on Lady Gaga in song format (she meant to write a blog entry about it, but couldn't make it work, so she wrote a song instead. She hasn't memorized it yet, so she's reading the lyrics off her iphone, which is being held up by an audience member - hence the "scroll..." plea towards the end):
And now for the part where I try to wrangle my - still quite nebulous at this point - impressions into some sort of cohesive... thing. Basically: Amanda Palmer doesn't really have a stage persona. I'm not saying she's not charismatic - she oozes charisma. I mean it in the sense of a filter, a screen separating her from the audience. She essentially wears her heart on her sleeve, and seems to telegraph everything that's going through her head, either consciously or subconsciously, and in this case - mostly self-consciously. It's a bit tricky when you're a performer, because you're relied on to shoulder the show, to put on a brave face and soldier on, no matter what. And that, in turn, is tricky when you're doing a spur of the moment, guerilla gig, and the audience doesn't deliver the requisite spontaneity. There's a real fragility to these transient, unscripted moments, and I suppose it's very easy to suddenly find yourself sprinting in place, several feet off that cliff, cartoon coyote style, desperately trying to keep the illusion going.
Well, this time the audience did not deliver, as people verged from non-responsive to embarassing, and the place seemed to put her in a different mindframe too. From what she said, the way these ninja gigs usually work is she posts online that she's going to be at a particular location (usually al fresco), people show up, she fucks around with the ukulele, and everybody has a laugh. This was the first one organized in an actual music venue, with a stage, an audience, and proper sound equipment. As time wore on, she seemed to grow more and more self-conscious about fucking up chords on the ukulele, and not giving people a "proper" musical experience. She kept saying how now she has to come back and do a proper show, because this way she can't show us what she actually does, which is play the piano well and perform her own music. And that this was just her being charming. The real "moment of truth", in my opinion, came at the end of the show. She reluctantly did a request (cringing about butchering the song on the ukulele), and after the applause died down, she said it was a really weird ninja gig ending, and probably the most anti-climactic one ever. Then, as people were starting to get up, she asked if she could just do one last, short song. And played Creep - i.e. one of the only songs she actually can do on the ukulele. And she really belted it out, gave an awesome performance, as if trying to say: "Look people, I really know how to do this. REALLY. Ok?"
Feeling complicit and co-responsible for a performance is a rather odd, and not entirely pleasant sensation, especially when you have nothing to bring to the table (I was too inhibited to ask what her attitude towards slaying vampires was during the Q&A session), but at the same time, I left the club adoring Amanda Palmer to bits and wishing there were more people like her in the world, so hey... maybe that was the plan all along?
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