NZ photo dump + Voiceramble (plus transcript from Alex) (Patreon)

Hallo loves.

Voiceramble time. It's about 20 minutes, and I'm very half-asleep.

You can also listen on soundcloud (or download the mp3 from soundcloud) HERE.

Greetings from Aotearoa New Zealand, my friends.

I'm disoriented and still jetlagged as fuck and sometimes that's when I wake up with things just bubbling out of my brain. In the middle of last night, I woke up with an exploding head full of ideas about pain, trauma, ego and art, and I rolled around in bed for a few minutes and they slipped out before I had a chance to capture or write anything down. Back to sleep I went.

Early in the morning, I got up and felt like I might has well voice-ramble these random thoughts at you before they slipped away again.

The ingredients. No take-away really.

Just foods for thoughts.

One thing - the biggest thing - I am loving and appreciating about the patreon right now is the way I can dump, think, rough draft, workshop, bounce, ask, unload here without much second thought. Eventually, I'm going to write another book; eventually (sooner than later, I hope), I'm going to write this new Dresden Dolls record. Let it begin here. This is where I'm going to sit and think and reduce in my little cave and shake all of my thoughts and ideas down to their essential components.

You don't have to tune in, ever. That's not how this works.

Think of this patreon as my own personal NPR, or PBS, or BBC. It's always on, I'm always there spewing and blathering my news and reflection, but just because you've paid for it doesn't mean you have to tune in 24/7. That would drive a person MAD.

It's going to be a firehose of unfinished and unadorned Amanda-thoughts, as I process the last year, the last three years, the last fourteen years, the meaning of my band, the pandemic, the whole lot. But that's what my blog always was. Proudly unedited and messy and real and true and on the fly.

And now, finally, I get paid a salary to produce. More on that in the ramble below.

My impressions of being back in Aotearoa are too raw and fresh to even contemplate, but they'll come eventually, after they compost a bit.

Here's a little photo dump, meanwhile....

Ash & Neil on the ferry over to Waiheke from the mainland.

Second swim of the year belongs to you, Waiheke.

I lad some lunch/kai today at the local Marae (Māori meeting house) with my old friend Susi Newborn, Mike Smith and his daughter Bianca Ranson, who I met through Susi and the Protect Pūtiki movement here on Waiheke Island. My thoughts are necessarily expanding.

Back in the arms of the Kiwis. I missed it. I missed this.

And I hadda post this....just because it amuses me, is my friend Zoe Douglas. She's my local GP here on the Island and when I left, I loaned her my eBike. 

Now my eBike is famous, because it made the cover of the Gulf News.

YEAHHHH.

......

Here's Alex's transcript (thank you, Alex, we lovvvve you).

Good morning, my loves.

I've been thinking a lot the last couple days about trauma, and pain, and the supposed purchasing power of fame and recognition. I was joking with some friends the other day that you have to be really careful sleeping with and dating stand up comedians, because they usually carry so much trauma with them, and while they are funny and delightful and amusing on stage, when you get them behind closed doors and into bed, there can be a lot of agony.

Greetings from New Zealand. I just woke up. And I love you.

And I'm really jetlagged, but I managed to stay up last night until about 10 o'clock. I was very proud of myself. I was exhausted. And there is rain slashing down on the roof The weather here is insanely dramatic. It is as beautiful as I remember it, and the weather is making everything feel ten times weirder.

So I mentioned in my New Years post that I was thinking about working on a new book. And I've been exploring a couple of ideas for a new book for a while, and I think there are overlapping things, and things that are really piquing my inner curiosity right now, about myself, those around me, and in an interesting way, in the macro-sized vacuum black hole of America, and the teeny little micro-souls of the people that I've gotten to know over the past 46 years. And I have been thinking about trauma and pain, and scale of need in other departments. 

I have been thinking about what trauma does to the direction in which your human feet perambulate, and I've been thinking about what trauma looks like when it is not healed by the community, and what trauma looks like when it is just a free-floating agent. 

I have been looking with horrified interest, as I'm sure many of you are, at the story about the football player... Is it Damar? I think it's Damar... {it is Damar) who is lying in critical condition in the ICU, after collapsing on the football field. And I look at this metaphor - let's call it a metaphor - of men crashing into other men for humanity's collective entertainment and enjoyment, as a good starting point for this discussion as well. And what drives a human being to need to achieve that scale of recognition.

What drove me, as a little girl, and then a woman in her 20s, to need to be so recognised for my musical talent, or my stage charisma, or my writing abilities, or what have you? 

And where is the line between a kind of healthy community eco-system in which gifts and talents are recognised and cooked into the meal of the community, and what is the flipside of that? 

I'm thinking about anorexic 7-year-olds in beauty contests. I am thinking about men crashing into other men with such velocity that they kill each other. I am thinking about what happened to Michael Jackson. I am thinking about Prince. I am thinking about Janis Joplin. I am thinking about the hunger that comes with trauma. 

I've written about it before, not for a long time, but there is a Buddhist story about the hungry ghost. And the image of the hungry ghost is this angry, insatiable, hungry ghost, with a gigantic maw, and a skinny neck. So it eats and eats and eats, but it can't swallow and digest. 

And the lack of balance, the lack of symmetry, or proportion in this ghost, is what I think happens to a lot of human beings in this society, when our hunger outstrips our ability to digest, because our community has abandoned us. And the community, the village, the functional village, is the enzyme that traditionally would help us digest our own ego. And if it is gone, you are left with a deep hunger and no digestive materials. 

And following on, this makes me think about hatred, anger, and fear. Because they are all wrapped up in this same discussion. And just because somebody has a hunger, or a passion, or desire, clearly does not mean that they get to attain or obtain the object of their desire. And so on the flipside of this catastrophic village eco-system dysfunctioning, you also have incredible disappointment, and anger, and resentment, when human beings feel that they are not living up to their potential. 

I am thinking of the thousands of people I know who feel that they had a creative calling and it was beaten out of them. I am thinking about people who have levelled volcanic-sized hatred at me, and people like me, because they are jealous and resentful of artists. I am thinking about people who kill other people because they are so upset. I am thinking about America, and her problem with violence and guns. I am thinking about school shootings. I am thinking about what happens on either end of the tube when a community and a village does not function properly, and who gets spit out which end. 

So on one hand you have a 7-year-old anorexic in a beauty pageant, and on the other hand you have a 5-year-old boy walking into a high school and shooting all his classmates.

I am thinking about all of this, a lot.

I am thinking about what has happened to our men in this catastrophe. I am thinking about what has happened to our women. I am thinking about what has happened to childhood. I am thinking about what has happened to the experience of ageing, and old age. I am thinking about the rise of fascism, and I am thinking about what the fuck has happened, and where did this all go wrong?

You know, just some light, philosophical thinking. 

That's what I'm thinking about.

I'm thinking about how much I love my patrons. Not just because it's nice to have patrons and draw a salary, but because this system has shielded me in a way, from needing to serve certain ego gods within myself. And also because patronage isn't really scaleable, I don't think. 

The same way I think New Zealand did really well in the pandemic because it was small and manageable and negotiable. You have a nice group of people who all pretty much know each other, and they looked around and agreed that they would just do a thing, and support an idea.

I think mega-stardom - or the desire for it - is inherently sort of catastrophic. 

We come from villages. And we're supposed to serve, know, and be known by our villages, for what we can contribute. 

And so the village can scale, but it still needs to feel like a village. If it doesn't, things start to feel very wrong, and lonely. 

And this is why, after seven years of Patreon, I'm so happy that it feels like a group of people that I kinda know. And I can't tell you how good it felt at the New Years show to just be able to greet, even if it was for five minutes, be able to greet my high-level patrons. And I know these people. It's Weston, it's Tom... It feels grounding and real. They came to see my show because, here they are, because they're like family, because they care about me and Brian, because they wanna see us do well on stage. There's no sense of me being high and them being low. Nor the other way round. 

It just feels like there are these people who have helped me because... I don't know, because they thought it was some kind of worthy investment. This band, this music, this artist, this offering.

I don't know if Michael Jackson felt that about his label. I doubt it. 

That's my early morning muse today.

I love you.

I'm gonna get up, and face the tropical storm.

Thank you all for being my patrons, and being beautiful.

....

More soon.

xxx

AFP