amanda palmer's open poem to jonathan chait (and other crimes)

he never said "is an idiot" tho

Pretty much everybody on earth has a threshold for how much to indulge an idiot who doesn't know how to conduct herself, and I think Ms Palmer has found her audience's threshold.

i mean you can romney that if you want

let me get this straight, this amanda smith person used kickstarter to raise money and spent it on drugs for robert palmer?

"If your position is that you aren't able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot."-Steve Albini, 1776.

xpost You're thinking of Amanda Jones from the movie "Some Kind of Wonderful," whose boyfriend hung out with James Spader, who dressed like Robert Palmer and did drugs.

New Shellac MP3: "I Built That"

Shellac... mp3? does not compute

they're not THAT cool

lol 1st responder to Owen has no idea what he/she is talking about

I can't speak to vinyl costs... but I do remember when a friends band released a 7" in the early 90's, they paid almost $5/unit then.

fucking REALLY. I released an ungodly # of 7"s in the 90s. if costs had been anywhere near 5/per I wouldn't have released one.

$5/per is totally reasonable in 2012 funky art-piece 7" terms, I'd even go as high as $10/per.

Girl says $100/per. Anybody else still wanna imply an asshole for saying she's "grifty"?

i’ve played a ukulele to hundreds of people on a beach for hours, for free

*imply I'm an asshole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmzN1p5q2sY

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrvzfwBTLA1qme01j.jpg

i’ve played a ukulele to hundreds of people on a beach for hours, for free. time to die.

xxp to aero yeah, getting vinyl done in the 90s was so cheap even my shitty-ass local band put out a couple of 7"s, and we were able to order so many for so little that I've still got a big box full of them in my attic.

Girl says $100/per. Anybody else still wanna imply an asshole for saying she's "grifty"?

no she doesn't, she says $25 for vinyl + packaging + a handmade arts&crafts piece in each of the four packages, if the orders come to pressing 300 copies each of 4 different singles

If there was someone on the beach playing ukelele for hours, I would happily pay them to stop.

The letter she links to has this interesting bit:

Artists are feeling desperate. I confess, I have found myself giving free performances in order to get ahead and perhaps have something notable to put on my resume. You'd think that this would help, but it doesn't and in fact it's made my position worse. Volunteer opportunities have effectively lead to more volunteer opportunities. Very very seldom have I found it leading to compensating gigs.

I think this is really at the root of all the 'devaluing' talk. If you want to do this cos you like AP, that's great. But if you want to because it's 'good exposure' or you think playing music for free is like interning at a job, then you are really buying a line. Not that anybody here has specifically said such things, but on various comment boards, I see "Oh, you have to pay your dues just like a film intern or whatever" and the person who said that is obviously not a musician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhaDA7TneL4

The more I think about it, the more I just think it's just kinda weird that you lot are getting so outraged by this woman asking fans to play two songs with her for free, when things like tour buy-ons exist in the world.

it's not that she's asking, its the way she's asking

I don't know if anyone is really outraged, it's good conversation fodder

The AnCo dude anecdote is actually a better outrage target but there's not much to talk about there. Either he's way tardy or the money's gone, both pretty bad, but what are we going to say about that? I mean, other than "never trust a hippie:

After reading that Why We Protest thread, I don't really want to critique this issue any more. FUCKING HELL the awfulness of those people.

For me, it's that she's being entirely inconsistent about it and paying people in bigger cities (and, interestingly, calling some of those people out by name, whereas most of the volunteers are still unnamed).

Also, and this is what isn't clear to me, is one of those two songs a song with Jherek, or are there extra songs the string players are expected to learn for his opening set? Because she pretty clearly states that the string players are expected to play for the opening act as well as her in her most recent response and one thing they wanted to be sure of is that they had the best players they could get given their budget.

Of course, MY response is "spend less on overly ornate merchandise and you can afford the players you're looking for"

https://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/amanda-palmers-sea-org-scientology-connections.102233/

http://i.imgur.com/nOauB.jpg

This is what one of the most reputable plants in the country charges to make a 7".

Nobody is presently raising a million bones for their tour buy-on package of awesomeness, wcc. that's the key difference here. everybody already knows that shit is awful. ap is presenting herself as The God Damned Future, when in fact what she's doing is behaving exactly as major labels have forever.

Yeah i do feel like those figures are misleading. $15/CD to manufacture/ship?

she's saying that the super-fancy hardback CDs she's making and posting in a package with a thank-you card cost more than a jewel case mailed standard

(the figures might be bullshit but misrepresenting them is no help)

'The more I think about it, the more I just think it's just kinda weird that you lot are getting so outraged by this woman asking fans to play two songs with her for free, when things like tour buy-ons exist in the world."

agreed.

yeah also there are people starving. how can any other behavior matter at all

I can't believe any one is typing anything in this thread when things like nuclear weapons exist!

How is it grifty when she tells people what they will get for the amount they donate, and then gives them that? (I get how you might think its grifty to get musicians to play for free, i disagree, but I get it at least). I don't really get how people are willing to donate so much for music that is...unspectacular to say the least, but I don't think she's scamming them, unless you take an extremely patronizing view of her fans.

To be fair I think the sentence could be argubly stated:

"'The more I think about it, the more I just think it's just kinda weird that you lot are getting so outraged by this woman asking fans to play two songs with her for free"

Would this be such a thing if she had raised only her stated goal of $100K and not $1.2 million?

as has been amply established, she's asking for audition tapes - she's asking people to prove their worthiness to play for free. it's a shitty look. not because she's a woman. not because the patriarchy. but because it's exploitation.

and asking "what if the people being exploited don't mind but actually enjoy it?" should sort of answer itself, doesn't it?

why people are bothering to defend amanda palmer from critiques of her economic model when human rights are at risk elsewhere?

Who's outraged? I just figure, I'll waste a few hours this morning talking about this w other people i like to read on an internet message board, and when i head out for the day, probably won't think about it ever again.

Would this be such a thing if she had raised only her stated goal of $100K and not $1.2 million?

Not at all, in my opinion.

I asked earlier, because I have no idea how kickstarter works, but can it be set up to simply stop when it hits its stated goal?

Kickstarter take 5% of all the money raised, they have no incentive to stop it.

Open Mics are the new sweatshop.

someone email Yancey, see what he thinks of all of this

I know that Kickstarter allows it, and why it does, I'm asking if they outright disallow limiting fundraising.

How can we dance while the earth is turning...
How can we sleep while the beds are burning...

¥an¢£y

As stated above, it is the fact that this seems a little ambiguous that makes it interesting to discuss. I wasn't completely sure what I thought at first but it raises interesting questions about things that are important to me. I didn't know about the Animal Collective guy before: what he did sounds obviously worse than this but it's too obvious to be worth discussing.

tbh it's not so much that AnCo dude isn't worth discussing as much as it is the discussion is much more likely to be an echo chamber of "wow that sucks, what an asshole"

what he did should really be trumpeted to the heavens

I've also seen pretty much zero on it other than that one kickstarter page. Has anyone asked him about it? Any reputable sources looked into/reported on it? The whole thing seemed more like an obvious fake/con-job to me, I figured pitchfork or whoever looked into it and realized it wasn't him and just dismissed it.