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

"Sadly, we don't know what they'd say right now, if we could hear the dead talk. But, you can watch my TED Talk."

but their legacy lives on
hewn into the living rock
of my TED talk

i hate owl city
i hate owen wilson
i hate owning a business
fun game imo

yeah, this is pretty objectionable

This is some cold soul-stealing shit.

She seems to be a fairly wretched person.

The wife adores Neil Gaiman and watching AP at work has actually diminished him in her eyes.

Guilt by association.

- AP makes video referencing oft-referenced Dylan clip, which is clever because it is a reference
- teenage girl makes video featuring similar device and it is a SIGN that she has done the same thing as AP's stunningly novel work because whoa what are the chances

Anyway I am sorry for what happened to this girl and I do agree with AP that I'm glad that Facebook didn't exist in my teenage years to be some shrill peer-pressure echo chamber for the meanest impulses of insecure-but-cooler-than-you kids to type the stuff they wouldn't even dare say to your face, piped into your own bedroom every evening... but yeah, what a tasteless excuse to talk about yourself some more

‏@alyankovic
You guys have each other's e-mail address, right? RT @neilhimself: @amandapalmer I am coming home to you.

lol

me speaking at TED is the equivalent of…
a violinist having her first solo concert at carnegie hall.
or an athlete getting invited to the olympics.
or like….anybody on earth being asked to give the commencement speech at harvard.
or a person who’s always wanted to be in “disney on ice” finally getting hired by “disney on ice”.

so she's been training for a TED talk since she was 6 years old?

More like the equivalent of a reality show contestant becoming a host of the nightly news.
or the guy who masturbates in the library getting voted onto the university board of regents.

speaking with "fucking BONO and PETER GABRIEL" does suggest a crack at the rock gasbag pantheon

The guy who wrote the Boston Globe story must be a terrible hack. He characterized the fairly detatched Joshua Clover blog item in the New Yorker as 'bitter' criticism. Exactly the same kind of stuff Amanda Todd was facing! though I believe that was coming from NYRB.

I read that blog post and thought it wasn't too bad at first, like OK cool you are excited about your TED talk, but then it just KEPT GOING.

‏@alyankovic
You guys have each other's e-mail address, right? RT @neilhimself: @amandapalmer I am coming home to you.

― some dude, Saturday, January 26, 2013 9:24 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are they going through a Heretic Pride phase?

Al is a fucking hero for that.

thanks man, but i just saw it on twitter and decided to share

Al and Al: Renewing America

In retrospect, I should have been even more of an asshole to gaimen on twitter

Hahaha

Good grief, remembering Gaiman's weird family history with Scientology, how much do you want to bet AP becomes one eventually?

lol m@tt

i cannot stop laughing at this

getting zinged by weird al would be an all-time life goal if it didn't involve being an asshole on the level of neilmanda

m@tt otm

Weird Al is a good dude.

I just want to reiterate how much of a scumbag you have to be to exploit a kid that committed suicide for sympathy and free content from your fans.

amanda palmandkiss

Al Yankovic ‏@alyankovic
My Anus True #ElvisCostelloAlbumsAboutAnuses

xp at least she isn't asking them to give her money

yet

my question is, how does this compare to the "USA for Africa"/"Do They Know It's Christmas" type of endeavor?

It sucks more

"Do They Know I'm Precious"

Bully Aid

what would have been an acceptable way for her raise the issue?

Let's start with have some respect for the dead.

one could argue that by highlighting this girl's tragedy to her audience, that Amanda is respecting the hell out of her

Cool, please argue away. I don't think simply featuring this tragedy on her blog is sufficient evidence for that.

reme,ber when amanda palmer was just someone who wrote a letter to robert smith? she's come a long way!

xp - I'm just trying to separate out the truly egregious behavior from the instinctual knee-jerk loathing

i don't think ap gets the benefit of many doubts

matt quit being a dick to gay men on twitter, it's bullying and it doesn't make you cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXGgWf2lacM

Yeah i mean i think on some level i'm just being knee-jerk about this. And i think even if this is objectionable as i think it is, it's not exactly mean-spirited on AP's part. She's probably trying to do a good thing. She just is so wrapped up in her own ego that everything she touches gets absorbed into her personal brand. She's basically a well-meaning vampire.

The Part 2 isn't filled with the words of encouragement she imagines herself coming up with in Part 1 yet instead asks her fans for. Part 2 basically sells her expertise at blogging, tweeting, emailing, how glad she is that she is famous, how happy she is that she can host these conversations, etc. It is brand-building, pure and simple. There is no substance to it, nothing in the direction of this bullied girl who killed herself. She is mentioned again, but only for the fact that someone close to her is re-blogging what AP wrote. The rest is an AP stroke-fest between her, her fans, the Salon writer that wrote about the content her fans provide for free, how hard it is blogging about how awesome you are, googling her name again, etc.

I tried reading her posts, pretending I was a fan, which was a bit of a challenge, especially because I couldn't stand that Neil Gaiman-scripted Doctor Who episode, but anyway...I could see how someone could read it and not find it objectionable. That girl's video was public, after all. The story of her death was public. And while I do feel like the way Amanda framed it was exploitative, I feel like contemporary culture lends itself way more easily to that sort of exploitation than it did when I was that girl's age back in the 80s. I couldn't imagine making some video about how pathetic and miserable I felt and put it up on the internet for random, potential bullies to see. To me, that would have been something I'd have considered crazy.

I have a pretty low opinion of almost any public statements re: youth suicide fwiw. Her posts are heinous in the specifics but really no more morally reprehensible or self-aggrandizing than any It Gets Better video.

I do think it's interesting how she talks of herself as being bullied, but then describes "people on the internet with opinions" in the lowest and most demeaning of terms.

that's the thing - while she's definitely engaging in some egomaniacal, distasteful shit - it's the kind that also might make a bunch of teenagers feel loved, understood etc. so while if todd's family was like "fuck off with this shit and pay your trumpet player" they'd be well within her rights, it's worth acknowledging there are ways she could flatter herself without bringing warm vibes to the little vampires or little palmer fronds or whatever she calls her fans.

lol "palmer fronds"

Yeah i haven't even considered tying this into the "pay your musicians" nonsense. In that case her fans' willingness to play music gave her plenty of free publicity. And in this case it seems to have worked the same way, only instead of them playing music it is writing comments. In both cases fans do most of the actual work while she coordinates it and receives publicity and praise.

The good publicity is baked into a "We Are the Media" cookie she gives to fans every blog entry. The bad publicity is propped up as proof that she relies on the fans for emotional support.

the reason this thing seems odd to me is the timing, coming well after the "It Gets Better" campaign and the media focus on Phoebe Prince and Amanda Todd and bullying becoming a huge deal.

It's like she's going to post the Kony 2012 video on her blog next.

make a difference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-w1GeH8KPU

trying to figure out forks' post