it's my 44th birthday, a new forum for love, and a terrible story {official thing} (Patreon)

{patron only}

hello, my loves. greetings from the air bnb on the hill in havelock north, aoteroa.

sometimes i suggest a soundtrack for a post-reading, if it's really long. 

may i, for this one, recommend bach's cello suites, a sublime aural experience that always calms and connects me  to my self (available here for free, played beautifully by istván várdai on youtube. or crank up your own copy.)

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

oh, loves.

it is my birthday today, in new zealand at least. i was born in 1976 on april 30th. i am 44 today. 

first: 

i'm holding a livestream party tomorrow (my time), just to see my friends, really, but i would love you all to come. it'll start at 11:11 am NZST omn thursday (which is 7:11 new york time on the 29th, wednesday). some of my closest friends are going to come online and play songs and do dances and hold me in their digital arms. 

one of my most belvoed friends jason webley is going to take my requests, another one of them, whitney moses is going to sing, and two others, sxip and coco, are going to do a bespoke performance...there will be surprise guests....this is is more "for me" than for anything else, but i want you all to come and bring your love. the link to RSVP & stream is here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/afpbirthdaystream

it's totally open to the public. 

and i am going to enjoy my birthday no matter how dark and confusing life has gotten lately, motherfuckers.

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

now.

if you want the short version of this post: 

today marks the historic official re-opening of the shadowbox forum, a a gift i've been wanting to give myself and the community for going on, oh, five years now. as approved by the patrons during this webcast, i'm going to use patron dollars to pay for the forum, and that's why this post is an "official thing".

the team has been working on it for months. it's only open to patrons at the moment, but will be open to the public soon enough.

if you want to leave me a birthday wish or birthday-craft-photo-art-greeting, i'd love you to join the forum and leave it over there, where uploading photos is (yay!) supported. more on that below....and here is the thread: 

https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/afp-44th-birthday-make-a-thing-thread-i-love-you/1084

it looks like this:

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

i was going to write and post this before i went to bed, but i fell asleep with ash in my arms at 9:30, after having one of the most lovely nights i think i've ever had with him. 

we've been listening to "the phantom of the opera" lately...at his request, i swear...and he's been walking around the house singing the fragments of all the melodies, using whatever words he knows and filling any blank lyric-spaces with beautiful and surreal mutterings from his head. 

this has been his favorite melody, the "angel of music" leitmotif that's first sung by meg, the sweet opera chorus girl, to her troubled (i mean, she's being haunted by a basement-dwelling murderer) friend christine, after her accidental debut at the opera (here it is in the film, which i just saw for the first time, on youtube):

where in the world have you been hiding?
really, you were perfect
i only wish i knew your secret...
who is this new tutor?

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

so tonight, ash was in one of those surreal-pre-bed moods, where things just tumble out of his brain, and we began a game of conversing only in music, using only this melody as the container for our conversation, including occasional full key changes. ash has also, fyi, been obsessed with the plastic laundry basket belonging to this air bnb. some of ash's verses went like this (feel free to sing to the tune of "angel of music"):

i want to put you in this basket
and then i will kill you
i want to go and have some chocolate
then i will go....to bed.

and i would respond, in melodious love:

but ash, you didn't eat your dinner
so you can't have chocolate
if you had eaten just one fish-stick
things might have been...different

we went on like this for fifteen minutes.

our first true ... duet.

he could not have known that it was the best of all possible birthday gifts he could have given his mother...the gift of watching his relationship with melody and words blossom and unfold. 

he's still only four.

i love him so much.

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

i awoke at 1 am with ash still in my arms, went outside and looked at the stars, the southern cross and the other still-unfamiliar constellations, and came to you, to talk.

when i awoke, my heart was pounding, as it often has been in the past week or so, and i was having a small but real little panic attack. 

i drew deep breaths, and i drew myself a hot bath to warm my shivering body and stop my jaw shaking and my teeth chattering, and i drew my self to my self, and i drew a cup of wine into a glass, and i drew the draft of this post in my head, to calm me.  then i came to type.

i often write a birthday post and ask for something, and it's usually some request to share my music further, or to donate to a charity, or some such.

this year is different.

this year, i am in lockdown, far from home, away from my community, scared, lost, navigating an unknowable future, in a country that is holding me with grace (i mean, jacinda? my hero) but where i have almost no friends....and it has been very, very hard. 

and i want to ask you this: please just do anything you can to wrap yourselves around me.

i need you all right now more than i think i ever have. 

if i am allowed to ask anything of you in this moment, it is this:

please, hold me.

i will hold you back. this is all i've ever wanted, really. this mutual holding. it's just getting very real.

hold me....

that's all i ask of you.

:)

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

this community has held me through everything.

everything.

fucking, everything.

fire, brimstone, anthony's chemo, the collapse of the dresden dolls, childbirth, kerfuffles galore, miscarriage, the legal battle with my shitty major label, best-sellings and awards, abortion, mental breakdowns and artistic triumphs for twenty fucking years.

i know you've got me.

i know i've got you.

i need you.

just trust me. this is one of those moments.

i need you.

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

this all being said, i find it wondrous and strangely beautiful that today is the launch of the new community forum, and i want to talk in depth about what that means, and what the internet has meant to me over all these years, and how things have darkened and lightened, and how they have evolved, not always for the better.

but first, i want to tell you a terrible story that came to me when i was outside looking at the stars.

i think it's a better time than any to tell it.

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

when my best friend anthony was dying back in 2016, and i mean, dying....in the last few days of his life, when i'd flown back on zero notice from london to sit at his deathbed with a few friends....something very terrible happened. 

i was seven months pregnant with ash.

i'd forgotten about it. i'd forgotten about it until a few months ago when it all came flooding back for equally terrible reasons. i was in a hotel bed in portugal, navigating a terrible week of dark internet bullying brought on by something i'd posted on twitter, and my manager jordan called to tell me that he thought me twitter account had been hacked. it was the morning of my show in braga, and i was in bed, with my friend gabrielle motola at my side. 

i think your twitter account has been hacked, jordan said.

my body froze, my already low blood-pressure dropped, i lost my breath.

what do you mean? how? why?

i just went to your twitter to take a look at things, he said, and your bio now reads: "grifter, charlatan."

i want to say i laughed, but i don't think i laughed.

jordan, i said, that was ME. i did that as a stupid joke.

silence. then

oh, thank god.

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

i have been trying to find ways to cheer up this air bnb.

i went to one of the closets and found a box of old christmas decorations.

there were two wooden light-up stars.

i usurped them.

they have been carried with me, for the last week, from room to room.

i put them on the piano.

i put them on the curtains in the reading room.

i put them in the kitchen.

i put them on the mantle in my bedroom.

they are flexible lights in the darkness of the moment.

so are you.

so am i.

we all are.

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

time bends. 

it expands and contracts and blurs. 

we are all feeling this now, in COVID times. 

i've had so many conversations with people who cannot quite tell one day, one week, one conversation from another.

i'm not sure how many hours i wandered anthony's kitchen and watched him slowly die...64? 72? 89? 106?...but it was a few days that merged into one memory, marked by flashes of polaroid-clarity. i remember holding laura, his wife, and breathing deeply. i remember worrying that ash had died because he's stopped kicking, and googling, and drinking a gatorade, and feeling his returning kick like a balm, i remember the sweet neighbor kids bringing over a painting they did of a tree, and laura putting it on an easel in the living room even though anthony was past words and vision, i remember the weather being beautiful.

and i remember - who knows how many hours before his last breath - that my facebook account got horrifically hacked for the first time in my life.

in my memory it was a few hours before he died, but it all merges. it could have been the day before. 

i got a text from someone on my team, i don't remember who. my assistant, maybe.

i am so sorry to bother you right now, given what is happening. there is an emergency. you need to call.

i stepped out onto the porch, aware that at any moment i would miss the moment, so i never wanted to be far from anthony's hospice-bed in the living room, and i called.

amanda, i am so sorry to tell you this right now. your facebook has been hacked. we are all working on fixing it. but don't be alarmed if people text you and are worried.

i hung up the phone and went to look at my facebook page.

i cannot describe the images and the content, i cannot even remember. i can only tell you that it was some of the most horrific imagery i've seen in my life: the worst of the worst. the worst, shitty, violent, sexual dark and graphic collages humanity could dream up. 

i was already doubled over in emotional pain, with the thought of losing my very best friend any minute, and now i was...

i was sort of at a loss.

what do you do when pain happens within pain, and then pain within that pain?

my mind scrambled to try to figure out who would do this, now, and it must, it must, it must have been maliciously timed. or was it?

people knew i was at my friends deathbed, i'd written a post about it on patreon. it was personal. who hated me that much? who was that evil? who, who, who?

or maybe it was just shitty timing. bad luck, the worst.

i will never know.

i don't need to know.

the tears i hadn't allowed myself to release yet for anthony sprang to my eyes. but still, i just mostly felt...rage. in justice. cracks in my optimistic faith in humanity to be fundamentally good.

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

what do you do when things are already more painful than you can bear, and then the unthinkable happens?

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

my team was my salvation. they got to work and within minutes, every post was deleted and the situation was fixed.

but it left an oozing scar of un-trust.

i think i erased that memory within days of anthony dying. i just couldn't bear to think of it. i needed to drop back into mindfulness, into friend dying, into grief, into the small community gathered so beautifully around anthony as he drew his dying breath.

i let it go. 

but it was filed somewhere inside.

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

why am i telling you this? 

why now?

(it's your birthday, amanda, can't you be fucking cheerful?)

well, for several reasons. 

we are all - many of us, most of us - in lockdown right now, which is almost more than we can bear.

and still, life keeps handing us emotional hurricanes. 

we do not get to choose.

we do not get to choose when life and death happens.

sorry.

nations may have stopped certain factories from manufacturing, but fate has not ceased to manufacture suffering, death, grief, injury, infidelity, cancer....heart failure on every level. 

we have to deal, as we often have, with pain within pain.

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

when life hands you a pain sandwich with pain on top and pain in the middle and then pain for dessert....this is where community comes in, and this why i don't feel like it's too much of a stretch to explain to you why i asked my team to light a turbo-fire on the completion of a new community forum to hold us all during this moment in time.

when things get this bad, we need one thing: 

each other.

we need us.

we need to feel not alone.

i know i need that right now.

i need to feel not alone, and i need to feel it in the right way.

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

yesterday, i walked up a hill and i took this photo.

everything seems very lonely. 

but it's not.

it doesn't have to be.

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

the shadowbox community forum, the original one, was a forum started by the  dresden dolls in around 2004.

it was a robust and super-populated forum in its heyday...this was before facebook and twitter and so-called "social media" platforms. there were thousands of members and sometimes hundreds of posts and topics a day.

there was no barrier to entry and no cost. the band paid for the hosting and we appointed trusted friends and fans to moderate the goings-on to make sure that bad actors were warned and ejected as needed.

people used the band as a way to initiate their entry and fundamental reason for being there, but the forum wasn't about the band, and it wasn't about me...

it was about the people who loved the band, and news about the band wound up taking up very little bandwidth. people talked about love, life, politics, family, heartache, grief, music...everything you would talk to your friends about.

it was like an amazing cabaret bar where you could always drop by and someone was online, music was shared, careers were developed, people on the shadowbox even met and got married, had children...it was a digital umbrella of love and trust.

when i needed a place to go chat, connect, and feel less lonely because i was on tour with the dolls and feeling lonely and isolated, or back at home in boston tired of writing emails and sitting in my underwear at 3 am wondering how i was feeling, i would log into the shadowbox and simply shoot the shit with people there, share my feelings, share what i was listening to, listen to peoples stories. talk a suicide off the roof. hold a hand. ask for a hand. tell a fifteen year old her songs were good. it was ... family.

it was a beautiful, early iteration of the internet.

then twitter happened. 

2007 was when things turned around, and it all happened without my really noticing. 

but as twitter flashed its incredible technology my way, i gradually stopped logging into the shadowbox, with its less-shiny tools and its lack of instant-instant-instant gratification and notifications, and i started putting more of my thoughts and feelings into the little twitter-prompt-box.

i do not regret twitter, and the things that have happened there. using twitter, i gathered thousands of people together, did gigs on beaches and in basements, found couches to crash on, and connected with humanity at a speed and depth of immediate intimacy i never thought possible.

but. but but but.

something was lost.

twitter and facebook and instagram are profit-driven, and popularity-driven.

i found myself thinking new, ugly thoughts. i found, over the last ten years, the behavior modification inherent in systems like twitter and facebook, where the reach isn't democratic, where an advertiser is always lurking on the other side of an emotion, where things are just not really....fair.

i found myself measuring my own validity in follower counts. i found myself learning and internalizing the alogrithms. 

(pictures of me perform well. pictures of me in lipstick perform even better. pictures of ash perform very well. pictures of me and husband and child perform the best. pictures of me in a feminist rage while wearing almost nothing surpass everything. posting during business hours is a better idea. saying "fuck" will anger the algorithm. don't do that.)

i watched these thoughts entering my head and i despised them.

i still think them, and i still despise them.

i want something better.

there is authenticity, and there are a billion shades of interpretation. i started to feel, a few years ago, like we were all being forced, in some way or another, to perform less authentic selves.

i went to my inner team and told them that i'd like to start the migration, very slowly and lovingly, back to a forum-based community.

where everyone has an equal voice.

on a forum, there is no system to drive you towards "likes" or "reach".

fuck that, honestly.

it's just people, talking and sharing.

this is what i miss about the internet.

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

patreon also came into play, and i have to say...i love patreon, and i've been using the platform for five years. it's brought a bounty into my life that i can never quite put into words, but i try.

still: the tools are clonky. people have been complaining to me since day one that these posts feel like mega-=phone dead-ends, since the commenting system is so shitty. i agree. we are so used to twitter and facebook where notifications keep a conversation alive, where we can post hyperlinks, photos, all the things to which we've grown accustomed.

also, posting comments here has aggravated people to no end. the tools are not intuitive.

i have been talking with patreon for this about years and their advice is always: use outboard tools. 

so here we go.

i'm doing it. we've done it.

it's about time, and it's my fucking birthday, and i want you to shout

HOOOOOOOORRRAHHHHHHHH!!!!!! from the top of whatever roof you're quarantined under, because it is going to make our community so, so, so much better.

here it is:

https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

we talked about various names for the forum, incliding the "AFP community forum" but in the end, keeping the original name won out.

the shadowbox was first named after one of my favorite songs by my favorite artists, edward ka-spel of the legendary pink dots.

it felt fitting.

and we decided to keep the original logo and icon...the dresden dolls "heart plane":

....which i thought up and drew as our official band logo back in 2005.

it still means so much to me.

the collision of movement, war, heart and art.

it's all still happening.

.................  

now, the nerdy stuff.

as i said way above, we decided to thing-charge for the forum because it cost thousands of dollars in development and staff time, and it'll keep costing us money to host and admin. everyone seemed so fine with that, and i thank you.

if that makes you feel icky, just do me a favor and CAP YOUR PLEDGE. that way nothing ever has to feel icky, ever.

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

this is what the forum looks like, in a screenshot:

we've been testing the relaunch of the shadowbox forum over the last couple weeks, in beta. 

i first sent the link out to patrons in the $25+ tiers so we had a teeny group of people to test everything out while we tweaked the back end and made sure everything was working once people started posting. 

when things felt stable, the team felt ok about having more patrons test it out as hayley fine tuned everything and fixed member security and posting settings....we also tested out a $5+ only patron section to chat about the random surprises offered to that tier, and test out a space for specific reward tiers and that worked out well.

so.....now we're ready to send this to ALL patrons and have you start posting and using this beautiful space.

eventually, we'll share the forum with the public, but for now, let this be a safe haven for fellow patrons to congregate.

there have already been some wonderful connections being made, like a vote your own adventure illustrated story  and photos of people's refrigerators.

note, and this is important: this is not going to REPLACE THE FACEBOOK GROUP. i know the facebook group is beloved by many, and i have no plans to take it down. it'll live on and on and i hope it will evolve forever.  

this forum is being built beside it as a bigger, better boat: an alternative to using facebook's platform. 

for so many reasons personal and political, i cannot keep my primary energy and love for my community under the facebook banner with a clear conscience. 

i plan to ask you to hold conversations over there whenever possible.

you'll see that when i post here, i'll ask you to hold deeper discussions over on the forum with an associated thread.

i'll still use the group over there from time to time (and i'll still continue to use facebook, and twitter, and IG, etc...of course, i kinda gotta) but i hope this marks a shift in use and consciousness.

 and i hope people defect over to this new forum with me.

so,

my loves.

LET US get started,

start posting.

post from your heart. be honest, be real, be respectful. 

before posting, use the three gates of speech:

at the first gate, ask yourself “is is true?” 

at the second gate ask, “is it necessary?” 

at the third gate ask, “is it kind?”

if you've never used a forum before...let the experienced forum-users take the lead, and follow suit.

how we set the tone is important. let's make a beautiful and kind space.

i hope that this forum lasts for YEARS AND YEARS and i want to get it off on the right foot. THE GOLDEN RULE: DON'T BE A DICK! JUST BE ... KIND. 

read, explore, chat, try posting photos. ask questions. start threads. go crazy. make freinds.

really.

make friends.

start here, reading the community guidelines:
https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/community-guidelines/18

then go forth and post. you must create an account to view the forum:
https://forum.theshadowbox.net

if you're brand new to forums, we recommend that you read discourse's user guide:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-new-user-guide/96331

......

here's a few threads we've already started:

hayley claims penguins are the best, and wants to start a fight with you (in "GENERAL CHAT"): https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/penguins-rule/51/3

i asked for ideas about good new dresden dolls cover songs (in "ALL THINGS DOLLS") https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/new-dolls-cover-songs-send-us-ideas/81

i asked for help with advice about how to keep chickens, for real.... (in "GENERAL CHAT"), but then we made a new category for my personal posts called "ALL THINGS AFP", where i'll be dumping my twitter-like posts: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/actual-advice-about-keeping-chickens/926/21

for instance....i wanted to see if anyone is in my neighborhood here in new zealand (n the new ALL THINGS AFP category): https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/who-is-here-in-aotearoa-new-zealand-esp-near-napier/927/6

AND ON AND ON....

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

*IMPORTANT*, nerdy, but important:

YOU CAN EITHER LOG IN WITH YOUR EMAIL OR DIRECTLY WITH PATREON. 

there are patron-only sections of the forum. if you want access to those sections, you must either register an account with the SAME email address you use for your patreon account OR create an account "with patreon" - which will take you through steps to log in with your patreon account.

it's your personal choice whether you want to use your real name as your "username" or create a "handle". many people on the old days of the shadowbox had nicknames/handles, i'm going to use my real name...it's up to you. discourse will give you a section to write "username" and "real name" so you can do both if you want. your call.

one last nerdy note....

the platform we're using is called DISCOURSE. if you have experience with using discourse, or previous experience with being a moderator or an admin of message boards and forums, and may be interested in helping us out and joining our little community mod team, send us an email: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net - we'd love to have experienced forum moderators help us keep things tidy.

in the mean time, if you have any questions or notice anything funky, feel free to post in the SITE FEEDBACK board on the forum:
https://forum.theshadowbox.net/c/site-feedback/2

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

a huge thank you to hayley for spending MONTHS of her life getting this moment ready.

i hope this forum brings joy directly into her life in lockdown in NYC. 

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

i hope to see you there.

again.....if you don't know where to start....start here:

leave me a birthday art-greeting in this thread.

https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/afp-44th-birthday-make-a-thing-thread-i-love-you/1084

as i say in the post....

your soul to mine…it could be a poem or a photo…i would love something you’ve made, created, crafted just for me and for this strange moment in time.

don't send me a link to a random video of your cat. i love you, but time is precious.

i have fantasies of hand-crafted messages glittered to recycled terrible report cards, scrawls of hope painted on bodies in sharpie, snippets of your sweet life bomb-headed into mine, anything to bring me cheer and remind me how un-alone we all are.

if nothing else inspires you, at least go to this thread and take a goddman picture of your hand with a sharpie scrawl on it wishing me a happy 44th. consider it an art challenge.

i'll be there, tomorrow, reading and crying. i love you all so very very much.

thank you for being here, thank you for being my patrons.....thank you for being my stars in the darkness.

happy birthday, me.

and....

happy birth-day, shadowbox.

may this dark pain-shit sandwich we are currently surviving hold a layer of light and sugar, in the form of better tools for loving and caring for one another.

all my love,

xxx

afp.

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol.

2. see All the Things i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

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

4. 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/

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