The Dresden Dolls Diary

De-Poisoning

i never post direct follow-up blogs, but in case it just seemed to be necessary.

i came home to boston from texas tonight, went out and drank with my housemates, caem home again, read all of your posts, and turned off my computer.

then i ran a bath.

then i i sang along to/danced in the kitchen to/lip-synched into the bathroom mirror to every single song from the smiths "the queen is dead".
i stopped "mr shankley" and leanred the chords on piano. the bath sat there.

"the boy with the thorn in his side" had particular relevance.

then i took a lukewarm bath and kept listening. fine.

then i turned the computer on and wrote this.

now i'm going to bed.

there is a light and it never goes out

there is a light and it never goes out

there is a light and it never goes out

there is a light and it never goes out

there is a light and it never goes out....

love
a

Music is Poisoning Me

i used to listen to music all the time.

it was like church.

from the time i was really young, it was sit, sit sit, then later sit and cut and paste and listen listen listen to music and get lost inside of it. worshipping, mindlessly.

what happened?

i think it was a few things.
i have to now point out the irony of the fact that i tried to put on music on my itunes to write this diary entry to and had to turn it off.

i can't handle a soundtrack anymore.
everyone else around me seems totally capable of listening to music while they email, while they work, while they write, talk, live.
i can't do it. actually, who am i kidding. i've never been able to. i couldn't do my homework with music on. i coudln't concentrate.
music was different. music was an activity in itself, unless i was doing something completely visual, like drawing or collaging or making a fanzine or pasting up shapes and glow-in-the-dark-stars on a ladder onto the ceiling in myu bedroom. music was o do physical, listening work to.
i think part of the problem is that i don't do those things anymore. almost all of my work is brain work. that doesn't allow listening. and when i am doing nothing, i want quiet.
i don't listen to much music anymore. i can't really handle it. and it frightens me.

it's an identity crisis of sorts.

i've been at south by southwest for 3 days now.
this is the land of music, of overmusic, uebermusic, of too much sound, of show flyers and business cards and CD demos flying through the air like so much pollen. they all land in the gutter.
you see them there, soaking in the dirty rainwater, but you can't stop to reflect, the crowd pushes you on. noise and more noise drowns out even the good music.

in the last 3 days i have
-played in a rehearsal space with brian for 7 hours
-played a show for about 1000 industry people (it was a good show, a good show yes yes yes)
-laid comatose in the hotel room, shunned housekeeping
-spent 12 hours in the studio recording with ...and you will know us by the trail of dead
-been in countless bars and clubs playing music

and i have been wondering all the while.
music?
what is this shit?

so

i put music on, music people give to me, and i can't hear it anymore. my mind is full of things that aren't music.
but there are So Many Ways of listening. i can't help it. i have always listened to lyrics first. through the years i listen with my business head, my ME head, will this band be a good opener, will this band appeal to other people, will this band XXXXX and all of a sudden i cannot hear anymore. my head is so clouded with judgement that i can't listen. i can;t hear the way i used to.

i used to just listen. and i liked, or i didn't. then all of this happened.

that's why i was so ecstatic when i found regina spektor. sure, i was excited because my brain fired off FRIEND COMRADE WE SHOULD PLAY TOGETHER OOH TELL PEOPLE OOH but fundamentally there was something deeper, something that said: none of that shit matters. i felt the same way when i heard the latest antony & the johnsons, and the trail of dead record that came out last year. just.....Good. good good good. disregard all other voices while listening. but it's getting harder.

i almost never listen to music anymore. i own great headphones. i have a great stereo at home. but i almost never use them. i can't. when i have free time and i am on the internew or emailing, i need silence. when i am at home, i like to listen to my apartment. when i am doing dishes, i turn music on. i have two choices: Friend Rock or Not. Friend Rock is the name i adopted (from ad frank, orginally) for the CDs that friends and fan give me. they accumulate very quickly. when i get home from tour, there are usually dozens. they get given to me on the road. i do not listen as i go along. i can't. i probably, at this time, have over 300 un-listened-to Friend Rock CDs in various piles and Cd wallets at home. I keep up with them, i organize them, but i rarely sit down to listen. when i do, it is a job. sometimes brian joins me. it goes like this:

insert
play first 10 seconds of track one
> if engaging, listen to next 30 seconds
x if not, eject and fling
> if engaging, listen to next minute
-- if not engaging after one minute, skip to next song
x if not engaging after next song, eject and fling
> if engaging after next minute, comptee song and continute listening
> if still engaging, rejoice

this is a VERY basic breakdown. often i will skip through 4 or 5 or 6 songs on a bad CD before flinging.

but a lesson in demo-giving....make sure the first two songs are strong as fuck.

back to my conundrum.
listening to music has become WORK.
i don't want it to be. i listened to music for years because i loved it, not because i wanted anything for or from it, not because i wanted to DO something with it.
though that;s not really true....even in high school i was making music videos in my head to every song on my walkman. but that was outside reality, it doesn't count.

it's all fucking relative.
we played for a huge audience at SxSW, and fucking slayed the show as far as i'm concerned, and the first reviews to come up on the web were terrible. but the show was great. it's starting now....the Great Divide.
i can tell now, there are going to be people out there that just Have to Despise this band. what are they listening for? what do they want? some people freak about us, some people hate it. obvious. but DESPISE US? is it that we're so threatening? why? because we're dong what we want? because we're not directly mimicking bands from 1983? or 1973? or 1993? i dunno. maybe.

but i think Everyone is listening differently nowadays. the Joy Of Music is disappearing rapidly. it's all about other things. things outside. things like credibility, coolness, crowds and t-shirts. when did it happen? this must have been happening in the late seventies when some people were listnening to donna summer and some were listening to the sex pistols and that's how you chose your friends. but was it like THIS? where a band was a compelte advertisement of Who You Are, the way it seems to be with teenagers nowadays? was i in the middle of it and didn't notice? confused. bob lefsetz would have an answer, i am sure (bob: i was born in 1976).

about a month ago i got the new kate bush CD. i am not a fan, i actually just recently discovered her catalog, which i like don't love.
i was curious. she hadn't put out a CD in 12 years. double disc. i heard the about the fourth track (mrs. bartolozzi) on the first disc and i just stopped. i fucking loved it. and i didn't listen to anymore. i just listened to that track. over and over. for five days. i probably put it on 20 times. i couldn't bring myself to listen to the rest of the disc, much less disc two. wrong of me? i don't think so. i was just so excited that i wanted to savor it.

i want music to be like church again.

ach.

conrad from trail of dead fascinates me. he is one of the best songwriters i have ever met and he seems to be totally blase about recording. but then again, he's made more records than i have. will that happen to me? will i disappear into the next room into the clutches of a video game when someone is singing a vocal on my next record? it's totally possible. he's a genius. he can do what he wants, he gets no complaints from me. rock and roll and what it means, all of this shit, is a myth. everyone does what they want to do. always has been. there is no Truth.

recording with them today was mind-blowing. so different from being in the studio with brian. this band pieces songs together. they're almost never in the studio at the same time. i can't fathom that. what can that possibly BE like? we listened to track by track and i laid down piano on a few tracks that weren't finished, taking sveral takes to get everything right. then we did a new song track from scratch (me on piano and conrad on guitar and donald on drums) and then conrad and i laid down some back-up vocals on the one we;d just recorded. and it all seemed....so....simple. when brian and i are in the studio it's like take after take of MUST BE PERFECT madness. and this was just...."oh.........yeah. it's fine". and it was fine. maybe we're too uptight. but then again, it's all relative. i listened to two ofd the finished tracks from the new trail of dead record and that shit is TIGHT. i assume they will take the mess and drivel i recorded and turn it into some kind of sonic masterpiece. donald and i had some art-noise fun doing a nuch of overdubs for a long song in which we put a brick on the sustain pedal of the 9-foot steinway and just made as much noise as possible inside of it using brass knuckles, sticks and guitar picks. conrad and i went out drinking and talked about music and the State of It.

there were moments in that studio earlier tonight where i felt complete, ever more complete than being in the studio making my own recordings. it felt real. making music without thinking too much. conrad and i came back to the studio after drinking at the local (have you ever tried an irish car bomb? - don't) and just played and played on the piano, re-tracing all the songs we'd written back to their stolen sources. his came from a shane macgowan song. mine was stolen from the psychedelic furs. his was stolen from radiohead, which was stolen from a paul mccartney song. indeed, he said, there is nothing new under the sun. we could have played this game for hours.

in other news:
the album is coming out (in the USA, at least) in exactly one month. the tension mounts as the reviews come in black and white from every side. the press in the USA is indifferent, the press in europe and australia are freaking. i am going home for a week or so of family and friends and rest and then we are hitting the road for about ten weeks nonstop. i will be surprised if i have the energy to blog but i might surprise myself as this had become ever more therapeutic. reading all of the comments (yes, i still do, you motherfuckers) is one of the things that keeps my life rolling and helps me not feel alone. i am constantly astounded and ecstatic to find how many intelligent and literate people read this shit and comment on it. i love the internet. i still can't believe it's completely real but i am starting to. every time i get a real, thick book from amazon.com i have more faith.

love
a

Blather:Japan.Fans.The White Stripes.PMS.Bad Press.

The nice thing about having a blackberry, besides the fact that I can check email while sitting on the toilet, is that I realized I can directly blog while anywhere and send the text to myself. Since this feels like a candidate for one of the more miserable days of my life, I'm going to keep an ongoing log. While sitting in chairs and in cars. While waiting.

8:00 am boston time - logan airport. in a chair, waiting.

I woke up at six. I was still incredibly tired and the first thing that occurred to me is that I was leaving and I wouldn't sleep in my own bed for a while. So a strange impulse overtook me and I hugged my quilt and pillows goodbye, realizing immediately that it was some bizarre half-asleep lame-ass excuse to stay in bed. We canceled our show in maine last night. Brian wasn't able to play in vermont two night ago, he had a fever of almost 104. He stayed in a hotel bed and I played solo, inviting the audience to sit on the stage and pellet me with requests. I did my best. I was already sick myself at that point and my voice sounded like shit. I forgot the lyrics to "girl anachronism" so invited members of the audience to come up and sing them instead. Charming. I fucking hate that: I hate being able to charm my way out of a sloppy performance. But who cares, it is it is. We drove to new hampshire and both got onstage for a last gasp, canceled the maine show and drove home to collapse. Brian went to the doctor and was diagnosed with strep throat, I'm going to go to the doctor the minute we land in japan. We have almost 20 hours of flying and layovers in front of us. When we land, we're supposed to sleep, wake up, and talk to the press immediately. I'm not sure how this is going to go down now that I've lost my voice and have been communicating to emily and brian via pen and napkin. One thing is certain: if I were talking, I wouldn't have the inclination to be writing this. I talk a lot. It’s too strange to stop. We talk about nothing when we travel, anything. We listen to the sounds of our voices to remain human. Look at that. Remember that. Why is that. Why is there a giant dunkin’ donuts cup in the terminal? Where do they actually manufacture these huge coffee cup sculptures? Your dandruff is growing. I hate The Man. Do people steal salt and pepper shakers from airports. We should email the japanese label rep. When are you knocking yourself out? Is "glorified" always used ironically? I wonder if I'll ever grow to like bloody marys the way I grew to like spinach and broccoli. Ad infinitum....we just talk. We talk to feel not alone. Words make our mouths exercise. We stop listening to each other and we don't even care. It's understood.

9 am - sitting at the gate. in a chair. waiting.

I went through my Logan Airport Hudson News Stand Ritual and bought two bottles of water, The Economist and Teen People. Life is all about balance. We looked for spin magazine, because we know we're in it, but they didn't have it. No early morning narcissism fix for us. The plane is stopping first in chicago, two hour layover, then tokyo. I'm knocking myself out when we get to chicago. I've been reading the early reviews of the record online. Everyone is able to download it, and I ain't gonna blame them. It's the future. I can only remind all of our fans that the artwork packaging is beautiful and the experience is not complete without owning it.

The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and david bowie together?

On a different note, in the wake of last weeks bombing of the iraqi shias' askariya shrine, a wave of sectarian reprisals ensued, mainly against sunni arabs, raising fears that the country might tip into wholesale civil war. Despite a four-day curfew and the deployment of american and iraqi troops, the communal strife continued, leaving at least 500 civilians dead; some morgue officials put the toll at more than 1,300. In addition, our shoot with emma roberts (yep, julia's niece!) was a total lovefest! The star of the new movie "aquamarine" divulged her crush on singer Teddy Geiger and her Juicy Couture obsession ("I'm a walking ad for their stuff!") and raved about Teen People: "I get my copy every month!" Get her glam look with a Michele Busch necklace ($140; michelebusch.com) and Charles Worthington Smart Fixx Curl Enhancing Cream ($7; at Walgreens). President Bush's ratings are at an all time low of 34%. Gloss plus balm in one, soothes lips as it shines. Security issues surrounding the sale of six American Ports to a Dubai-based company. Advanced Any-Angle Self-Tanning Spray. Yes!
-
12:30 - chicago time. in a chair. waiting.

Kate calls it InLove Chicago. Hard to tell from the airport.

--
2 pm - Chicago Time. in a plane chair. waiting, pretty much, to land in tokyo.

In the air after a layover that included bad food and a trip to the bathroom. Emily and I got stared down by our fellow passengers in the gate for spreading out and doing yoga on the floor. Thirteen and a half hours is a shit long time.
I started to get airportitis on the terminal shuttle waiting area. We accidentally developed a new game called "beached". I lay down on the ground and told brian I was a beached manatee. He said that a manatee wouldn't flail its arms out like that, so I scrunched them in. He then listed off names of beached animals (norwall, scallop, lobster) and I would do my best to imitate, writhing on the floor while we waited for the shuttle to terminal 5.. Emily noted that we were freaking out the midwesterners. My voice is coming back, but I can feel my sore throat in my bottom teeth.
-

Some Time - the screen tells me we're over alaska. It’s10:52 tokyo time. chair. sit. wait.

I just watched a movie that seemed like it was made with the intention of ripping me apart. I don't often cry at movies. One scene in "million dollar baby" got me six months ago. But it takes a lot. I cried four separate times just now, breaking my own record by far. The movie was "north country" and I'd never heard of it...just flipped it on. My god. painful sexual harassment scenes, teenage rape and if that wasn't enough, a central character who comes down with Lou Gehrig's disease, which killed my step-brother Karl when I was 21. No wonder I lost it. I think its time to go to sleep, clutch my luckiness like no day in recent history as much as right now, right now, right now.

-

7:30 pm - tokyo time
We're on our way to the hospital so I can ask the doctors if they can help me with my throat. We is me and Koji, our roadrunner label rep. You never know with these guys, but he's cool as shit. He picked us up at the airport and got us to our hotel. Emily is staying behind with brian to poke him with hot tongs so that he doesn't fall asleep and start the evil jetlag cycle. I want to drink some Aquarius and they didn't have it in the vending machine outside the hotel. Aquarius is a lovely cloudy powerade kinda water that tastes like lychees. Its habitforming. There are vending machines EVERYfuckingWHERE in japan. Drive 80 miles to Nowhere, see japanese trees and grass and not a human soul around, but there WILL be a vending machine at the intersection of any two dirt paths. I remember the last time we were here for a few days, my life seemed strung together by moments in which I would dawdle off to find a vending machine that sold Aquarius. We tend to like that which we can understand. Put money in, get drink out. Much less difficult that pointing, gesticulating and bowing like mad for forgiveness of the intrusion. Vending machine could give a shit if you're a whitey or a brother or a martian. Just knows you got the cash.

8:30. Pm- tokyo time. sitting in car. waiting.

The doctor at the hospital said I have a clinging lowgrade flu and an allergy to an unknown substance. maybe I'm allergic to music. He gave me some antibiotics and sent me on my way.

11:30 am - tokyo. on subway. sitting. waiting.

I crashed hard after dinner, woke at 4:30 am, popped half an ambien and crashed til 9. The journalists and crew don't come pounding til noon, so I am soaking up these few moments of freedom, I've been wandering around shibuya all morning, finding a bank and buying haircombs and feeling that dark feeling I feel every time someone walks by me wearing a surgical mask. I would estimate that one in 30 folks here in tokyo sports the surgical mask full time. Its like some strange twilight zone episode if you're not used to it.I wandered into a dept store and checked out the surgical mask display. There are dozens of options.

On an internet note: The band hosts a forum (many of you are probably familiar with it, if not a part of it: www.theshadowbox.net) where people log on and discuss the band, the shows, each other, whatnot. I browse it often and post once in a while but have generally watched it evolve into its own ecosystem, for better or worse. There's a vast assortment of intelligence and pettiness, although the trend seems to be leaning towards the petty as the older fans start getting turned off by the squealines of the newer, younger fans who post thirty times a day and sort of dilute the relevance of topics with inanity. This is just life, so it goes. But last night I saw something that hit a nerve.

Basically, some teenagers sporting mall fashions posted a clip to YouTube of themselves drunkenly singing along to "coin-operated boy"...on a boat. Nothing creative about it, just some drunk Ordinary Fucking People having a gas, but the overall reaction of the forum-dwellers was this high-minded "how dare the/rhese people should die/this makes me want to puke" reaction. I fully understood, there's a part of me that totally related to feeling this about a band. But this was downright unsettling. In response, and I partly blame my cranky jetlag, I posted to the thread and voiced my disgust at the elitism. You can see the whole thread here: http://www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=7892.

And as I sort of expected, some people jumpily apologized, but most were understanding. I reminded them that I have the disadvantage of never being able to discover the band for myself; I'm in it. Music is for Everybody, but I also remember really vividly the protectiveness that I felt about my favorite bands when I was younger, especially when the jocks in my school started listening to the cure. DIE, I thought.

Its such a fine line between being open and honest and being preachy. I never want our audience to feel like there's A WAY to listen to our music. There's millions. Every band who becomes popular has to deal with this. He’s the one. He likes all our pretty songs. And he likes to sing along.

Anyway. All food for thought all the time. I'm glad I at least feel safe and confident enough to have this kind of conversation with our fans, even if its a dicey one. How the fuck else would they be able to trust me, or me them?

March 7
12 noon - tokyo time - sitchairwait

Yesterdays interviews and shoot were simple and went off without a hitch. I was expecting the questions to be more on the typically japanese conservative side and they mostly were save the guy who asked us if we could remember our first orgasm experiences. Brian explained in Long Graphic Detail and I was spared because he took so long. Last night emily, eric (long ago friend and dolls supporter, he used to come to all of our boston shows wearing adam-ant war paint on his cheeks) and I went to the white stripes show in tokyo. We didn't get in touch ahead of time so we got last-minute tickets through Koji but luckily ran into the Stripes' tour manager, who worked for us once in new zealand. This was lucky; we got to watch most of the show from the side of the stage and meet mr jack and ms meg. They reminded me so much of me and brian after a show...tired but gracious, and jack was a total gentleman. We griped about label control and vocal throat sprays with each other and jack showed me his amazing holga camera with multi-colored rotating flash (sort of like those 4-colored clicky pens). meg was also very sweet and relieved to be coming up on the end of a solid year of touring. jack looked nothing like michael Jackson in person. Their show kicked, great energy. And I was pleased to hear them using pre-recorded guitar sampled on one song. Not purists = good.

5 pm tokyo time - sitchairwait

More journalists, more questions, more sticky rice snacks and more walks through the streets of shibuya. One thing I can not get used to over here is the utter lack of male gaze. Emily says she loves it, but she's probably a far greater general victim due to the fact that her tits are twice the size of mine. Italy is pretty bad, there I often feel like a piece of meat walking down the street, winked at, sized up, clucked at and generally drooled over even when I am thoroughly unwashed and look like shit, just because I have a vagina. Here, if a gaze happens to fall on you, it doesn't rest, and it certainly doesn't ever return for a double take. I find it disconcerting. I'm used to the attention. Its like: wait, what the fuck? Why aren't you staring? I washed my hair, I made an effort, asshole! We’re all so conditioned.

-

some night-time on the plane from japan to australia

i take it ALL FUCKING back. north country was obviously not a touching movie, i'm just dealing with early PMS, as proven by the fact that i just cried, TWICE, during a HARRY POTTER movie on the plane. either that or the stress is really getting to me.
This shit is unacceptable.

-

March 15th - Many days later, after Australia, in Austin, TX for south by southwest.
3:37 am. this time i am not waiting. i am alone, in a hotel room. i am avoiding sleep.

my blackberry proved to be a poor up-to-date blogging tool. I wrote up a storm (see above) and then couldn’t send the fucking thing to myself for a week because of technical difficulties. It’s not the future yet. It’s now a week later and I am alone in my texas hotel room, jetlagged and blurry, spent.

We went to Sydney and Melbourne and did press and radio stations and relaxed a little bit before flying here to texas. We played a last-minute gig in Sydney, at a teeny weeny burlesque club, during which I started to botch Girl Anachronism again...but this time no pretty young girls volunteered to do karaoke, so we skipped the tune altogether. People were completely shocked. This was a HUGE single for us in Australia. Eh, I said. We should’ve rehearsed. But when? Where? In the airport? This schedule is shit. We’re not being musicians, we’re being promo whores, it’s not good nor bad, but a whole different frame of mind. Getting up on stage to play all of a sudden feels about as natural as getting ripped out of a hot shower and tossed naked, complete with skis, boots and poles, on top of a black diamond slope. In a different country. Maybe exciting. Ok. Not normal.

I got my period on the plane from Syndey to Los Angeles and beached myself, squishing, in the back row of seats on the plane. Brian and I always joke that all of this touring and travel is terribly unnatural for a menstruating woman, who in the olden days would have been sent away from the tribe to squat quietly over a nice patch of green moss for 3-4 days to bleed and suffer in peace. Nope, stuffed liek a lemming into a long sardine-can with wings bulletting through the sky with 245 other people in my breathing/bleeding space. Very far, very far from the nice patch of green moss. i want my moss. I watched three movies (brokeback mountain, the squid and the whale, walk the line – was not tempted to cry a single time), ate chocolate and decided never to have children.

In more exciting news: we received our first terrible review for the album a few days ago, in venus magazine (I’ll give you the bad highlights):

“...Unfortunately, The Dresden Dolls’ lyrics are still self-absorbed and cynical. Palmer’s lyrical concerns have become a bit cliché and, let’s face it, talking about fucking in pop songs hasn’t been shocking for the past ten years. While the rock production is compelling, one becomes suspicious that it might be masking some weakness in the writing, which becomes particularly evident on the latter half of the album (by the time you reach “Me & The Minibar”, you realize this is the third nearly identical ballad on the CD). This album quickly loses it’s ability to surprise you. Despite the fact that the music, dealing with intimate sexual matters and detailing troubled relationships of all sorts, should be confessional or at least personal, it seems as though the Dresden Dolls hide behind songwriting convention and sonic sheen. This album may leave you wishing the Dolls had traded in their fancy production for a better set of tunes.”

Should I be nick cave and not read the terrible ones? No no no!!! I must. In fact, given the popularity of the Hate Mail section of our website, I think we’ll have to start a Bad Press page. Much more exciting to read than the good press, and more revealing. And now I feel naked: hiding behind songwriting convention has always been my specialty. Next they’re going to do the exposé on our secret writing collaboration with the Matrix and the fact that an aged and greedy Vivienne Westwood actually designed our entire aesthetic from scratch 6 years ago in a secret New York boardroom amongst equally aged and greedy old suits with Punk Cabaret pie charts and stripey cloth swatches. “Let’s start them off in Boston....New York would be a dead giveaway” they whispered. “Nobody will ever suspect!”

Ah, oh well. Hey, ho. Here we go.
Bring it. I’m ready.

love
a

The Cardinal

I'm in my hotel room, in London, we've been on a press/promo tour for almost two weeks. I am fucking dead. Nobody understands exactly what this is when I tell them, so for the interested, a press tour is this (extracted from our printable schedule):

HOTEL INFO FOR TODAY in MILAN (tomorrow amsterdam, next day london)

Hotel:Una Tocq, Address: Via Tocqueville, Milan Tel: +39 02 6207 1
Check in by: 6:45pm (2 hours ahead is advisable – leave 1 hour minimum

Depart: 8:45pm Milan (MPX), Italy Flight KL163
Arrive:10:35pm Amsterdam, Holland

Hotel Information for tonight: American Hotel Amsterdam :
Leidsekade 97, 1017 PN AmsterdamTel #: +31 (0) 20 556300 www.amsterdamamerican.com

10.00:am check out. Transfer to Universal office for interviews – please have make up done
10.30: MTV.IT interview for MTV web site ( with digital camera) Sara Poma
10.50: PIG monthly alternative trend/culture mag, circ. 50.000: they request 1 casual shot
+quick Q&A on what DD are wearing
press interviews
11.10: RUMORE monthly specialized rock music magazine. Circ. 25.000.
11.30: ROLLING STONE monthly music and trend magazine, circ 50.000
11.50: break
12.05: XL monthly music-trend suppl.to LaRepubblica newspaper,circ.600.000
12.25 KATAWEB leading news portal, interview for their music page
12.45 ROCKOL music news site
1.05pm: lunch break
2.15: press interviews
2.15: ROCKSTAR monthly music magazine, circ. 40.000
2.35: JAM monthly specialized adult rock music mag, circ. 20.000
2.55: VOGUE leading fashion and trend monthly maga,circ. 100.000
3.15: ROCKHARD monthly specialized rock music magazine, circ. 15.000
3.35: ROCKSOUND monthly music mag
3.55: transfer to Radio Popolare, Via Ollearo 5
4.20: RADIO POPOLARE. Taped interview (show: “Patchanka”) for syndacation of
alternative radio stations across the country. To be aired in April
4.50 Transfer to ‘La Bottega Del Forno’ Corso Sempione 82
5.10 refresh make up
5.30 ALL MUSIC:Interview for ‘Extra’, weekly show dedicated to rock and alternative bands.
Dresden Dolls as special guests. 15 mins taped interview (will air in April)
6 00: end of promotion and leave for airport (50 mins drive)
8.45 take off for amsterdam - fly
10.35: Dutch rep. to meet band at airport - Drive to hotel.

Asleep by midnight. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. repeat. wake. sometimes play small promo shows in smoky clubs or in fluorescent-lit painfully sterile radio stations.

and how does all this feel?

pros:
1. get to talk about myself, my songwriting, and my most innermost pain all day with foreign journalists who enthusiastically seem to think our new record is the shit
2. hopefully lay groundwork for good record sales in europe
3. meet label and publicist people who work their asses off for us, unseen all day in european offices

cons:
1. not enough sleep
2. no exercise
3. extremely limited access to loved ones, even via telephone
4. terrible food
5. constant back and neck ache from plane, taxi, train and van travel
6. voice loss
7. severe loss of sense of self
8. urge to kill others around self due to overexposure of personalities
9. bad air, bad decor and bad vibes abounding
10. glimpses of cities through bus and plane windows without even getting to take a walk outside the fucking hotel
11. overwhelming feelings of guilt for not enjoying myself when others would kill to be on a trip to promote their own record
12. almost no privacy
13.. italian wirless access (non-existant)
14. clogged pores and redness from laziness and use of shower soap on face
15. itching, irritabilty and general disease
16. swelling, bruising, nausea, high fever, punctured lung, diarrhea, gasping, choking and moaning etc.

and we do this why....?
pros must outweigh cons in some universe.

This is one of our few nights off. We're almost done. Home for three days off, three days' worth of tour, and then more of the above "wake. repeat. wake. repeat." for a week or so in japan in australia. I have the image of that frog experiment in which the frog will jump out of hot water but not if he starts in the water cold, warmed, gradually unknowing to an unnatural and untimely end. Brian and I are both starting to get chronic airportitis, that feeling you also get in the supermarket or the drugstore if you go at 3 am and you walk dazed down an aisle, forgetting what a supermarket or drugstore is for. We have started to sleep while sitting, and we have started to think that banging our heads together on the plane, to see what kind of sound it REALLY makes, is a good time. Things are weird. We baaa like sheep being dragged around by ropes constantly and find it hilarious. Nobody understands.

Talking with the journalists is a trip. They generally love the record...due out April 18th. It's called "Yes, Virginia". Nobody in Europe gets the reference. "Aren't you afraid that this is too personal music?" What a question. We talk a lot about Virginia, the letter, the idea. Believing in things you cannot see. Trusting. Hardly an interview without the state of current events fitting in with the whole theme of the record title and the songs....the current mess over folks denying the holocaust, free speech being censored, the cartoon Muhammad issue...all of it converging over hotel lobby coffee tables. We did a naked photo shoot in germany because we were too lazy to get dressed.

But before I left for the hellhole of a promo-tour, there was The Cardinal.

You have learned from a previous post that I am not a hippie.

To add my typical-amandian disclaimer pre-able to this story, as i must, i am not a Nature Person either. I generally don't get nature and I certainly don't usually get Art about Nature. I have an aversion to paintings of Nature and songs about birds the way I assume anybody of discerning taste does. Nature just seems like such an easy target. It's like a love song. It's there, it's great, we know, why bother? But this is obviously teenage hangover and short-sighted, and the best Art is the probably the rare Tasteful Nature painting and the Tasteful Love Song (done only, I am convinced, by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, John Lennon or equivalent).

In any event, this Cardinal showed up shortly after I got back from the last leg and before I left for my solo show and promo trip to New York a few weeks ago.

He arrived with a THWOK on my window. I heard him from the bathroom and rushed into the kitchen, expecting to see a dead, or at least unconscious, bird on my fire escape. I knew that THWOK sound, birds had come and mistaken my window for safe passage before. But he was perched there, fully conscious, all nature-y looking with his red redness and his little black mask and disarmingly cute yellow little beak and now-very-popular-with-the-girls-in-new-york unihawk/mullet hairdo. And I felt heavy for this bird. He had obviously flown into the window thinking it was part of the sky. Damn humans, I cursed us, why must we fuck up the sky by building apartments with windows, thus screwing up the birds forever. Oh, but I was wrong. In a few moments time, he flew into the window again. Full force. THWOK. And then again. THWOK. Each time his beak and head would make full impact on the upper pane of my kitchen window and then he would re-alight onto the railing of the fire escape outside my second-story kitchen window. And now I was mystified and terrified. What on earth was he DOING? I taped up a piece of paper, an old letter from a dead friend, to the window, hoping this would aid him in de-mystifying the window-sky continuum.

The next day, around the same time, he came back.

THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. THWOK. I was really distressed. The paper hadn't worked. I opened the window, from the top. My movement scared him away, but sure enough, after a few minutes he came back. I stood there, perfectly still and bare feet freezing from the arctic air pouring onto the floor (it was about thirty-five degrees outside). I just waited. Then the oddest thing happened: he flew into the space where the window HAD been, fluttered all confused, didn't fly into the room and quickly retreated back to a tree. So, I thought, this is a masochist bird. He doesn't WANT to come in. He wants to bash his head against my window. The next few days, he arrived at around mid-morning every day. he was usually at work by the time I woke up...in fact two days in a row I awoke - i kid you not - to the now sweet and familiar THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK that I had now become accustomed to. I tried my window experiment a few more times, always with the same results as before. I was fully freaked. It was going on five or six days and I was really starting to wonder what in hells name was going on. But at the same time I was secretly pleased. This bird had chosen MY window to exercise his weird S&M ritual and NOT somebody else's and I therefore must be Special. This of course made me feel horribly guilty and I wished the bird would go away and yet stay and yet go away and stay. He would come by when I was practicing the material for the solo show, which was during the afternoon, trying to nail down the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had beaten myself into trying to re-learn from my college years so I could feel like a Real Musician. I began to love the little chirping sound he would always make before he thwoked. I would hear it from anywhere in the apartment and go into the kitchen to watch. Better than television.

Lee's theory (we had several morning conversations over tea in his place to the soundtrack of THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOK coming from my window downstairs) was that the bird was seeing his own reflection and wanted to fight. I didn't fully buy this theory. I've been looking out of my window for YEARS and I've never seen Cardinals in Combat.

Another friend of mine, who Knows Me Well, had a better theory: it was Matchbook.

Matchbook was my Boyfriend in college. I was 18. I met him my freshman year in the most weird and perfect way. I had been trying to overcome my fear of performing for years and years, and I scheduled my first performance in a room at the college where there was a grand piano and about 50 seats. I made flyers and shook sweating every night for two weeks. I planned about 13 or 14 songs. The night came and I played, for the 20-plus strangers assembled there, with my heart and head in tremors and my soul all terrified. I didn't have any friends at the time, barely, I didn't have anyone to talk to after the show...I just knew I had played, gotten over it, and had a recording that I could use as a demo tape with which to Move Forward With My Life. The concert ended at around 10 pm and I went back to my room and probably shook some more and killed time until my DJ slot at the college radio station, which was from 3-5am. I usually played a weird mix of The Legendary Pink Dots, Neubauten, marching band music and strange spoken word from the music library....generally I would just pile my favorite 17 records into a bag and make live mix tapes for myself. Nobody was listening, it was the middle of Connecticut at 4 am. I ONCE got a phone call, asking me about a song I had played. I was Amazed. So I was there, spinning records to myself, and the doorbell light went off. I walked through the stacks and stacks and doors and doors to answer it, expecting it was some upperclassman DJ hipster who needed to fetch some rare superchunk or guided by voices disc that he couldn't sleep without. But instead, it was Matchbook. He was standing there, with a lit birthday candle shoved into a twinkie on a paper plate and a bottle of PowerAde. He knew me, but I didn't know him, he said. He lived in the house/society where I was thinking about living, and he has seen my flyer so he and some others had come to check out the show. And he loved it, he said. My first fan. We fell in love later that night and we stayed in love for a while. But there was a problem, which was his heroin use. I came from a place where people did plenty of pot and acid, but these sorts of drugs were mostly unknown. Of course, for the first 4 seconds I had the initial "wow....cool" reaction, visions of Lou Reed & Co. dancing in my head, but on second five I was disgusted. Needles in veins, no good. He had a habit, as did other people in the house. And on top of that, he had a heart condition and a six inch scar to prove it, ran straight across his chest like a cracked riverbed from an operation he had had when he was five. After a few weeks of dating and being in love, I told him to Kick It or else forget about my girlfriend position. He agreed. A week later, he came to me one day. He knew my demand for honesty was high, and he said he was planning on shooting up that night, and that he didn't want to lie to me. Fine, I said, but I get to watch to see what all this fuss is about. Fine, he said. So along I went. We were in his friend's basement room and I watched the whole simple, knew-it-from-so-many-songs ritual. Jab. And then a few minutes later I decided I had had enough. I was hurt. So I told him I was leaving to go back to my own little cement dorm, and that he could come over for love and sleeping later. He agreed. I went home and staged a nice suicide with chocolate syrup and red food-coloring and ketchup and lots of cuts all over my legs and arms (mind you - I wasn't a cutter and never was...he was fully unprepared for this) and set up my tape recorder. Then I stripped the bedsheets, added blood, lay down and waited. About an hour later he came by (swtiched on the tape recorder) and let him discover me. I let him believe it for about 13 seconds. That was cruel enough. After that, our relationship improved. He was very angry at first but then glad I had taken the time and effort to express my frustration creatively. He kicked.

A month or so later, I took him home to meet my parents and My Friend Who Knows Me Well, and something terribly sad happened. He admitted to me that he had been using dope again and promised me that he was ready to stop. We visited the bathroom together and flushed the rest of his drugs down the toilet. It was fun. The next morning, my Friend and I took him out to Brunch. There was a piano there. I had been learning classical music and I was delighted by this piano and I left our breakfast conversation to sit down and (slightly terrified, but not so much this time) attempted to play the Chopin Nocturne (opus 9 no. 2) I had been learning. My second public performance, and people clapped. But Matchbook was nodding off at the table and, according to my Friend, heard not a note. He was Gone, eyes closed, head back. I was so naive I didn't realize what was happening, but my Friend pulled me aside in the driveway when we got home. I Never Tell You What To Do, he said, but This Time I Will. And he broke it down for me. And the weeks wore on, and the drugs went away again but I never fully trusted. But still, there was love, and there was art and we made films. He was an incredible artist, Matchbook, a brilliant painter, and we worked on our work together. He was studying hard and showed me his sketches and told me about what he was learning. We shared all of our music. We had amazing sex. For a while, things were wonderful. Then summer came, we went separate ways and effectively broke up. The next semester back in school, things were awkward but smoothed out, and then the day after christmas, he died. I got the phone call in my parents bedroom, since I was home for break. I remember putting down the phone and crying like an infant, huge racking sobs all night. His parents said it was heart problems. I'll never know what happened.

So my Friend's theory was that upon my commencing of the Chopin Practice (opus 9 no. 2), Matchbook showed up to repent and - stoned, of course - started hitting his sorry head against the window to deliver some undeliverable message. We had a good laugh over that one, but I don't believe in Things Like That, so this theory was also no good.

At this point, I actually considered looking for a bird specialist to ask, but decided against it, since I was enjoying the mystery. The morning I left for New York, he went absolutely nuts. He stayed by the window almost constantly for about two hours and THWOK THWOK THWOK THWOKED his little brain out. He obviously knew. I was sad to leave. I waited until the last minute to catch a cab for the train. I called my Friend and mused for a long time about this Red Masochist on my fire escape. I told him I had googled for Cardinals and Symbolism. Hope and Suffering were tied for first place. I looked out of the cafe car of the train and it was a gray gray sky as I pressed the phone to my head. I didn't want to tell you, he said, but I knew about the Suffering part...they're supposed to be harbingers of Death. Fantastic, I said. Maybe the train will crash.

When I came home, the Cardinal was still there. He kept the same hours and by now, it was like the sun rising and setting. THWOK was a comforting sound. I thought about blogging about him but didn't want to ruin the magic. After a space of weeks, I can finally admit that he's probably gone, the object of his affection plugging away in hotel lobbies across the wide wide sea. But my Friend was inspired to write his own reflection about the Masochist-Matchbook-Hope-Suffering-Bird and here I share it with you:

He pecked and fluttered---pecked and fluttered-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck-peck
on the glass.
Scarlet symbol of “hope” and “suffering” the Cardinal at my window.
He draws me. Mystifies me. Pulled by the first peck he gave me:
into connection with his hope---hope of getting in---getting into me-that's what he wants, no?
Perhaps I'm more attached to his suffering---the suffering unrequited---for he suffers, no? Suffers for me, no?
His bloody passion reflected in his coat.
His pointed crown, tilting with strain in his trance of pain as he: peckspeckspeckspeckspeckspeckspecks.
I feel for him, I say, “Oh, here he is” when I hear, and turn to see the shock of crimson marked by the shroud of his black mask
and, bearing the weight of his need, I bend and soften toward his tiny body.
Hollow bones and feathers mostly (1.48 ounces)
Nothing. Nothing.
But the greatest weight I carry some days, seeing him at the windowpane. I face him separated: only a sheet of glass keeping me from his breath.

Am I his muse? He my poet? Does he know who I am, what I do? Does he need me? Need my help? Does he read me? Is he a mystic? A prophet? No, couldn't be . . . that's not why he's here.

Perhaps I'm wrong about The Cardinal, His Eminence-in the hierarchy of nature, which vested him with royal robes. Perhaps it is I investing the vested-one with hope and suffering--perhaps instead it is his own reflection in the glass compelling him and not at all me. With his “knock-and-you-shall-be-answered/ask-and-it-shall-be-given-you” attitude. Typical . . . for His Eminence-way--way up in the hierarchy--preening and pounding with his awe-inspiring vestments-his peaked crown. Tapping on the mirrored glass. Look at me look at me look at me! Can't get enough of him self. Narcissist!
Whoa, down boy . . . he is a bird after all and cannot be hopeful--suffer angst-can he? They cannot be egomaniacs, narcissists--read minds, or futures can they?

No. They can't. That's the answer.

He influences me though. Always comes in the mid-afternoon-pecking and fluttering persistent-passionate-entranced getting into me. He mesmerizes me always in the mid-afternoon. Influencing.
But today, the dawn of my departure on the train, he came rosy and early in the gray tired morning. Special visit---and pecked solid for an hour shouting . . .TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO---TIME TO GO. Or, perhaps: DON”T GO-DON”T GO---DON'T GO--DON”T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE-DON'T LEAVE.
Did he know I'd not be here a while? Know I was going, and in my going that I would suffer? Is he cautioning me? Does he peck a wake-up or a warning? Is this code reveille or taps? Do I need him, his help.

He makes me think. Influences me to reflect, to make meaning.
Is he my priest, my doctor, my shaman?
Am I his steward, his idol, his savior?
Is he god; god in this tiny red? God in nature as they say? Well, of course he is! What else could he be? Rorschach! That's what god is anyway. Project what you will, and learn about yourself from your divine projections--if you dare to look upon the face of god to learn. A red inkblot on a card . . .
The Cardinal: created in my image---yes, that's it, I'm god, I'm god too . . . that's what he's telling me. Because I've given him meaning, and life with hope, intention, goals and will. Made him who he is today. I and The Cardinal----gods we are. There, I've done it, found it . . . the world in a birdseed and hope in a drip of red.
Tea time---if they have any on this train . . .
cheek pressing the windowpane
Watch the bright sky of mind---steady-fickle---foolish
perfect.

xx

a

Oversaturation VS Mystique: round one

here seems the most appropriate place to bring the discussion.

the band, with it's never-ending crop of images and sound, has been led recently into a dialogue about overkill/oversaturation and when enough is enough. Everybody has their very different opinions about this, as, of course, everybody interested in the band (or products of the band) has their own agenda as well. Who the fuck is interested anyway and why? in what and how and how much and when is too much?

I hadn't thought too too much about it before. But the conversation was kicked off with the Sheet Music book, and then everything else got called into question. We live in the age of uberinformation, this we all know. I myself fall victim to it on a minutely basis, flailing late at night to pointlessly google one more obscure song reference, obsessively checking my email and cramming things into my head, reaching for ANYTHING to read when waiting ANYWHERE, unable to stop the floodgate of words and images that bombard me constantly, the mind candy that makes me think and ponder but rarely leaves me time to reflect. If I could read in my sleep, I would. But I shouldn't. i am currently reading a book called "in praise of slowness" and though i'd only recommend the first two chapters, the point is well taken. there's just too much shit, period.

We first realized that we needed to print sheet music about two years ago, when we started getting requests. people emailed asking for tabs and notation. then more people asked. then enough people asked for me to get off my ass and find a local guy in boston who could transcribe the songs (I can't write - and can barely read - musical notation) and the project seemed to be simple enough. But this being an Amanda Project, it was destined to take two more years, while I expanded and expanded the damn thing until the point where the actual musical notes and tabs seemed more like an Afterthought compared to the rest of the shit in the book.

i will admit it: I am an archivist of myself. I am a shameless archivist of the band. so it just seemed to make sense. Where and when else would have a limitless public 2D portfolio in which to cram all of the photos and notes and crap that has accumulated in various boxes over the years...boxes marked "of interest, to somebody, somewhere - do not throw away"? So I wrote a long introduction that ended being about 20 pages, pasted togehter all of the various album-related notes and photos and gave it to various friends to criticize and edit. Now, you see, I am not a prose writer. I can fake it as a blogger but you don't realize how forgiving you are being, yes you, as you sit there and read this. There are typos and run-ons and I am simply emptying out un-edited head-shit into your brain. Holding a book is different. a book is Real.

anyway, the thing grew and grew. ummmm. If i'm going to talk about this, i reasoned, why not that? and that? and that? and that and that and that? and so it went, becoming young-amanda-biography, band-biography, songwriter-101, and piano un-lesson all in one. i can't even read the whole damn thing myself, it spins my head. i think i will stick to writing blogs and songs in the future. my friend that knows me best says it all: "you use too many words". but that's beside the point. the point is, when we got to the 200-page completion of this beast, i had another Bright Idea. the Bright Idea was to include a DVD in the back of the book that held a 20-minute impromptu interview i did in the summer of 2003 with Wojtek Gwiazda, who was a film-making friend of my landlords who just happened to be in town with his fancy camera, sleeping upstairs. he wandered down into my bombed-looking mess of a kitchen, artwork and glue strewn everywhere and said

"what the hell is happening here?"
"I am making our album artwork."
"can i film you?"
"fuck yeah".

it was as simple as that, and wojteck (a charming and wonderful polish-canadian) came down and filmed. but this being the Cloud Club and the Cloud Club being what it is, the interview was of course also riddled with the Big Questions. why am i doing this. what is album artwork. and on and on. and mind you, i never thought this would really be seen by anyone, in fact, i forgot it existed for a while. i am in my boxer shirts and a stained wife-beater, all red and freckled from the july outside, looking like the unwashed, sleepless, manic, harried, starry-eyed workaholic that i was that month - two months before the record came out on our label. there's this great piece of spinach in my teeth. but there's also this beauty to it....this quiet, july morning, ivy-in-the-windows beauty that soaks onto the floor and into the discussion. it's ten in the morning, it's summer, it's roasting hot, pope is probably on the front steps drinking coffee, lee is probably upstairs screwing a tree to a picture frame, the birds outside are going nuts. it's perfect.

so, i thought, this 20-minute piece of thing would be the perfect addition to the Sheet Music Book, which, by this point, had evolved into an Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza. Anything and Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The First Dresden Dolls Album, where the songs came from, how the album was recorded....on and on. and this is where the resistance hit. pope and our Magic Manager cocked an eyebrow. isn't it a little overboard? isn't it just a little self-indulgent? do you REALLY need to include 20 minutes of yourself rambling on in your kitchen about the album artwork? don't you talk about it in the introduction?

i argued: i like it. i think the fans will like it. i think it's interesting. am i crazy?

no, they said, you're not crazy, but maybe you have no perspective. so i tried to look at things from their point of view. but i didn't agree. so more arguments ensued. it's expensive. it adds to the cost of the book. but - i argued - won't the added DVD be an incentive for people to buy it? no, they said, it won't. really? i have no experience with this, i said, i can only follow my gut. my gut says include it.

i sat with brian and our photographer friend kelly davidson and we watched it. i asked for their opinion. cut it, they said. so i cut some fat off of it.

then the late night discussions. what would elvis do? what would neil do? what would the beatles do? living in an image and video-saturated world, should we add our constant two cents or hold back? less is more. is less more?
wait, isn't more more? if less is more? what's more? less? is more less? if more is less, and less is more, doesn't that mean that more is still more? aghhghahghhhhAGAHAAGhhhhhghhahhahg.
oh, the ashtrays filled and the night wore on.

Manager says: "You need to protect your Mystique."
Amanda says: "But I don't want a Mystique. Has nobody noticed this obvious fact?"

this is where the blog came up in the conversation. Amanda says: it seems to me, a lot of people out there seem to appreciate the fact that brian and i have no interest in being Rock Stars and Superhumans With Mystique.
the manager says: but the printed word is very different from the visual image.

then i ate a christmas fish with a friend who used to work in the music business for a long, long time. he said: amanda, you will rue the day you stuck your hand in that toilet on your DVD. you aren't protecting your image. you're forcing people to ingest self-indulgent nonsense. why did you include that hour-long documentary on your DVD? It's BORING. you're not jessica simpson. get over it. you should not be directing the dresden dolls reality show.

in the wake of that, poetically, i needed to address the question of what to do with the 80+ hours of tour footage we shot on the october tour. edit it into another DVD? put it up in installments on the web? turn it into an andy warhol-esque art project, where we just stream 80 hours of footage of the band endlessly in the internet? so many choices. but all the recent feedback echoes in my head. we can output and output, but should we? discussions abounded. now i am confused. my gut has always served me well, but i also have no interest in being a stubborn, headstrong, sunset-boulevard casualty of my own archivist vanity. it's hard to know what to do. the superfans of the band will certainly be interested in any and everything, but they aren't the majority. how careful do we need to be? doesn't everyone edit everything as they want it nowadays ANYWAY? it's the FUTURE.

i have always been insecure about my totally narcissistic personality. i used to curse and psychically mutilate myself for years in high school and college, convinced that my own selfishness and vanity made it impossible for me to make a single authentic move, from writing a song to having a friendship to fucking brushing my teeth. my life was a movie. i like to think that i've transformed my attention-needing personality into something relatively constructive, and i've definitely managed through years of thinking and listening to understand myself better, to know when to step out of the spotlight, to shut the fuck up and listen instead. but it remains a sensitive nerve, i wonder why....i am actually making my living getting attention, up there on stage, applauded, focused on. and this is supposed to be normal (while in the back of my head all i hear is the tall adults of tiny childhood saying from above "just ignore her, she's just trying to get attention, poor girl" - sound familiar?). this is fingernails-on-the-blackboard-territory for me. i will never be fully confidant as close as i may feel, it's always possible for someone to stick an easy nail in my achilles' heel. just mumble the word "selfish" or better yet "attention-whore" and i'm likely to be seen in a corner taking deep breaths, trying very hard to quiet the bawling 8-year old inside.

in other news: christmas came and went, new years came and went (we played On Stage at our san francisco show with the String Cheese Incident, thus bursting our jamband hymens), and the 4-foot pine trees lay lifeless all over the sidewalks of new york this morning, waiting to be carted away by some magical elves.

AND

if your interest was piqued: the sheet music book/Epic Album Companion Coffee Table Extravaganza/200-page monster (with interview included....yes, i won the argument....pyrrhic victory? time will tell) is now officially on sale for pre-order on the webstore:

http://www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls/

pump up the volume

it's four in the morning, and i'm not tired.
i feel like i'm in that middle place, that nice and safe place, where nothing bad is happening. i am busy enough to not have time to reflect, but i have the feeling that what i would reflect on wouldn't be that bad. not at all. i tend to only write when i'm feeling down. i'm feeling up to flat to peaceful to ... i'm just steady. i'm just getting things done.

i shut the lid of my computer tonight at around 2. i never feel finished, but at a certain point i try to make a rational decision to get some sleep. but i wasn't tired. things are going well enough, i said to myself. i had spent the night boiling pot after pot of tea, sitting there at my kitchen table, formulating endless emails about the album artwork, the This and the That, the captions for the dozens of photos to the sheet music, proofing the lyrics, making plans with my family for christmas. the things that thread themselves together and never unravel and never end. Shit To Do.

i laugh at the idea of anybody thinking my life is all that interesting. i come back to boston from tour and spend time in my apartment, glued to my computer, making occasional trips to the store for nourishment. getting things done, like anybody else. we all know the pile. boring running around and feeding my mouth and resting my mortal coil on a space pillow.

but i didn't go straight to bed, as i thought i would. if you had asked me, my best guess would have been that i would floss, brush, wash my face and apply two kinds of moisturizer, and crawl into bed. i would read the next installment in the julie doucet comic book that lies there spread face-down next to my pillow, set my alarm, read for ten minutes, whack off and fall asleep like every other night.

instead, for reasons unkown, i took a walk down memory lane and treated myself to a movie in bed. movies in bed are great. laptops are awesome. this is rare, i don't usually allow myself to spend two hours that could be spent on sleep or making more beautiful album artwork on a movie. but i'm glad i watched this movie. i fucking missed this movie. i bought this movie on an impulse buy from amazon.com about two weeks ago, because it came into my head, and it was cheap. then it arrived and it sat there on my stove for a while, knowing it wouldn't be watched.

pump up the volume. it was like the breakfast club for the nineties. i was liminal.i didn't belong anywhere, i was right on the threshold. not really belonging to the eightie sor the nineties. my older brother and sisters were in the car when we came back from the breakfast club when i was about 9. i remember i was still timgling from seeing judd nelson's fist raise into the air as the credits rolled and the sun went down on the triumph of the teenage spirit. i remember resolving to be a cool teenager. i was so jealous of my older siblings, they got to live this. they were IN high school, that mysitcal world of detentions and smoking corners and heavy bookbags.

but once pump up the volume came out, i barley related as if i was watching my own generation on that screen - which technically, i was. it was 1990, i was 14, and i felt like the entire world understood something i didn't, that everybody was in on the joke but me. however, i had my fantasy, and i held onto my fantasy when i saw movies like this. somehwere, i kept telling myself, somewhere THERE IS A PLACE where teenagers riot in high school parking lots because a pirate radio DJ plays sonic youth and leonard cohen and muses about existence. just like i'd believed at 9 that there was some mythical high school where five kids from different socio-economic backgrounds and cliques could show up for a saturday detention and smoke pot and forgive each other. i spent most of high school fantasising that college would finally prove to be the PLACE since high school was definitely Not the PLACE where these incredible things happened. lo and behold, i was totally fucking stunned when college turned out to feel exactly the same. i felt like i was in high school except everybody slept over. it's taken me years to sort through this shit, and i'm not even close. pump up the volume. i had almost forgotten how fucking great it was. it propelled my straight back to high school and all of a sudden, there i was, in the bathroom applying black eyeliner, calculating exactly which route to take to english so i would pass by andrew thompson's locker. feeling inherently fucking confused, with absolutely no way out. feeling like i understood everything totally clearly while simultaneously feeling i had no idea why things anything was happening.

i pressed pause half-way through the movie, in a daze, and went to the bathroom stuck in high school. i couldn't believe i had my own apartment. it was like i was on acid. i was just looking around going "how on earth did i get here?" i felt like i had to be up at 7:30 so i could eat cereal, put on tights and skirts and combat boots and walk to school in the freezing cold, smoking ginseng cigarettes on the way with my walkman blasting strangeways here we come on one side and meat is murder on the other and flipping the tape over and over and over again, morrissey's providing the soundtrack for a life that i could find tolerable when the music was loud enough and every step i took and every tree i saw and every passing suburban car was just a planted perfect prop while the credits rolled by. walking to school with the music blasting was always opening credits. i never did closing credits. not that i remember. in-between classes, headphones on, volume dial jammed, my fellow students were perfectly-cast extras walking through the hall for those establishing scenes where the director is trying to set a mood for a Cool High School movie. What happened? What happened to John Hughes? Do the kids of this generation, the ones who are 16, do they really, really see Mean Girls and relate? Do they leave the theater wanting to run home and throw all their sports pendants and strings of pearls and soccer trophies in the mircowave?

Happy Harry Hard-On is my new personal hero. I don't need reality. That's my new answer. So Be It. I bought my rebellion at the blockbuster mall just like everybody else but at least it makes my stomach stir. i cry at weddings.

i stand at the kitchen sink, filling a glass with water, and i look to my left and see a bottle of dish soap. i'm still can't shake it. i can't believe i OWN this bottle of dish soap. i can't believe it's MINE. i can barely turn around becaue i know what's in the rest of my apartment and i know i'll be completely overwhelmed. a COUCH? where did these things COME FROM? who the hell am i to OWN a couch and a bottle of dishsoap? i mean, i OWN it, i'm not just using it because it's there. I OWN it the way I own my clock and my towels and my books and my dictionary. it's mine forever. if the house caught fire and i fled in my boxers and t-shirt and stood out on the street, the sympathetic passers-by would shake their heads. I'm So Sorry, they would say. I Know What It Feels Like To Lose Everything. No, I would say, clutching my small bottle of fluorescent orange Dawn, I still have this. It's mine forever and nobody can take it away from me, ever.

high school is never over. it just morphs into something more subtle. i had an experience last week in new york which proves this. i've been a curious fan of bright eyes for about a year, ever since i discovered the fever and mirrors record. naturally, since conor oberst (the singer and basically the band itself) represents adolescent pain better than anyone in the universe, i developed a class A adolescent crush on him. i don't get these anymore. i miss them. i prefer sleeping alone nowadays. i barely think about love. i have plenty. i haven't had a boyfriend in so long i've forgotten what it's like. honestly. i have these vague memories of romancing and cuddling and planning and fucking and calling and the whole nine yards and it seems like a blurry fiction, something that i just wouldn't do nowadays, because....well, why would i? i'm happy. i'm rarely lonely. i have close friends and people i can talk to, i don't feel isolated. i certainly don't miss the heartbreak and the drama. but old conor pulled it out of me. he literally screams that you Must Develop a High School Crush on him. so i hauled my ass down to new york because i wanted to pass his locker. now, any girl (or boy, i suppose) knows that this locker-passing technique is ridiculous. if the person doesn't have any interest in you, they are not going to give a fuck if you walk by their locker five to six times a day for an entire school year. if anything, they'll be irritated. andrew thompson probably was. so, in Rock Land, when you're in a band that's Making It you can have your manager call their promoter or/and manager friends to get tickets and passes for shows. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. my manager is a Good Manager. he almost always can. so i emailed him and got a ticket and a pass for the bright eyes show in jersey city, and there i was all of a sudden, sitting in a seat in a theater with my coat on my lap and my journal in my hands. to my left was the cooler-hair guiter player from the yeah yeah yeahs, and to my right were conor oberts parents. now, i don't know what kind of cruel and surreal trick god was playing on me by doing this. i can only imagine. while talking to mr and mrs oberst i find of course that (could it be any other way?) they were the sweetest, kindest smiling rock parents you could imagine. so proud of their son, just beaming. conor was drinking coca-colas on the stage and giving a decent performance, but he seemed bored. maybe he's always like that.

my few words exchanged with him backstage before the show were trite and forgettable. he remembered me as the drunk girl who streaked onto his stage glastonbury and we joked. he was nice but not interested in talking to me. his tour manager was not so nice, however, and sort of gave me that full-body scan and sneer and told me that they'd had a great tour and that he didn't want me fucking up the show. what? i said. no, no, no. i am not a crazy person, please believe me. i thought that glastonbury was like las vegas...what happens at glastonbury stays in glastonbury....? apparently not. my one attempt at crazy rock star behavior had been met with steely witch-burning rancor. i looked the guy straight in the eye. please, sir, don't worry. i am not going to ruin your rock show. i am a sane person. i don't do crazy things. in fact, i am a grave disappointment to all the fans out there who want me to be a lunatic. i'm really not. he was half-satisfied, but that feeling shot through me again....what was it? what was it? oh, i remember. it was That High School feeling. i've been so surrounded by people who like me lately that i've forgotten how it feels to walk down a hall of people who all stare at you as if you're a freak and a loser. which is exactly how i felt after the show, surrounded by pretty girls with quilted dresses, stylish shoes with the weird heels in the middle of the foot (i don't GET those at ALL) long hair and bangs. i bet i would like every one of these people, i said to myself, if i could be alone in a room with them, they play music, we have a lot of things in common SMACK why do you feel so out of place? are these people really looking at you so strangely? or are you just telescoping yourself back into tenth grade? i'm inclined to think that after the conor-rejection and the you-dirty-whore treatment from the tour manager that it was the latter. i had a nice talk with mr yeah yeah yeah and i had a nice talk with ms feist, the opener. it struck me that i had invited myself into somebody else's party and why on earth should i expect them to be kind to me? would i be kind to them if they showed up in my backstage after a dresden dolls show? of course. but were they being unkind? what was i expecting, the PLACE? the magical PLACE where bottles are clinking and everyone is everyone's friend in Rock Love and our cups runneth over and music and love bring us all together and it's All Good? this doesn't exist either. i learned this lesson over the summer at the rock fesitvals, where the magazines were pumping the public with stories of the Rock and Roll Life while backstage was usually a bunch of cold and tired musicians standing in line for catering, trying not to offend one another. maybe i just wasn't invited to the right trailers. maybe i don't really want to go anyway. maybe i think too much and they can smell it on me.

pump up the volume made me want to blog. it's the practical equivalent of having a pirate radio station, but quieter. but that's all i'm doing, vomiting out my head periodically like this.

people leave comments. these posts are re-sent over to our myspace page, where people leave comments. i read them all, in case you guys have been wondering. it's the most satisfying thing in the world to hold a one-sided conversation with an imaginary audience and then hear the reverberations, the echo delay on a random thought. it makes me feel less alone. in fact, i blame you, Yes You, for the fact that i don't want to go boyfriend-hunting (in case you're wondering how the conor story ended, we said goodnight and i left the show but i ran into him at a bar the night after. he saw the error of his ways and asked me back to his apartment, where we stayed up all night, drinking red wine and reading passages form oscar wilde fairy-tales aloud to each other while crying and holding onto each other for dear life and kissing for hours without ever taking our clothes off. just kidding. we said goodnight and i left the show but ran into him at a bar the next night where i decided that tenth grade was over and i didn't say hello, which probably relieved him). i blame you because i think this may be enough for me at the moment, to scream/sing at a crowd, to cry on a stage, to send my blather into the internet and hear the echo. i think it's all i need right now. i think it is. this does not mean that if Christian Slater at age 23 waltzed into my kitchen i would not try to Trap Him and Cage Him and keep him forever. i would set up a little pirate radio station in my bedroom that would broadcast into the kitchen and the bathroom only. every night at 10:00 pm sharp he would dj and rant and play the pixies and bad brains and i would dance wildy, naked, flailing and out of control in the next room, with an umbrella in one hand and a bottle of salad dressing in the other, stuffing string after string of pearl necklaces and sports pedants (which i would procure daily at ever-more-distant salvation army stores) into a mircowave i would purchase at best buy for that purpose. then we would fall into bed, exhausted, complaining about how difficult it is to be in high school and how nobody understands us and how we can't wait to grow up and get the fuck out of this town.

it's 5:30. i could've watched a whole nother movie.

miracle-gro

How to spend time when there's never enough time. there's no way.

Up in the cloud club, behind the old spinet, since the grand is at the studio, trying to remember how music is played. the sheet music needs to be finished, the sheets are staring at me, the ink is wet and everything i do is an accident, but some accidents are good. at seven o'clock, i decide that life is worth living outside of my life so i go out to see casy dienel at the lizard lounge. brian has my volvo down in new jersey, so i take the subway. people on the subway don't talk to each other, unless they're drunk.

getting out in harvard square, in a terribly weird mood, neither here nor there, i start to think about all the people i know who are getting divorced. three years, ten years, twenty years, it seems to make no difference. when will the world shift the paradigm and realize that alone-ness with sporadic moments of togetherness is better? everything i love to do, lately, is alone. but maybe that's because my life has become such a warped context.

walking to the lizard lounge, our old haunt where we played many a many a show, i descend the stairs into dark red. heroin by VU is playing. there are eight people there. in the story, it sounds like paradise, but in reality, it feels superficial. none of these scenes ever feel authentic. still, i order my beer and sit at a table, feeling like this moment is a worthwhile one, a rare moment worth enjoying. casey plays her piano and sings. she's wonderful. her new shirt keeps slipping off her shoulders. she seems lonely, so her music is good. she wants to move to brooklyn.

you held me
like a tundra
shifting blocks of ice....

i stay longer than i should and leave for the subway, sitting on the bench letting my thoughts spin and not paying too much attention. i decide to get off at park street and walk home. it's a long way, a few miles. all the bars are closed. boston is a bleak pre-pre-holiday wasteland. the lights are on, but no one's home. fall blow-out sale. everything must go.

i walk through the public garden and casey's words are still echoing.

you held me....
like a tundra....
shifting blocks of ice

everything is still picture-perfect, even though it's almost bare. the rose bushes and the swan boats.
i wonder how long into the winter they manicure the bushes. do they stop when it snows? do they never stop?
for the tourists.

i walk over the littel foot-bridge, singing my song to myself.
there's a couple kissing and they don't stop kissing, they pretend not to notice me. they hold a long moment while i pass.
it's not uncomfortable for me. i wonder if either of them is married.

i double-back after the footbridge to stay off the main garden path, so i can walk along the pond.
the pond isn't frozen, but there's no sign of life. all the fallen leaves have gathered to the banks, magnetism.
the whole park is desolate, just expanses of gray in the night, different shades of nothingness.
the pond is stillborn, even more man-made depressing in the fluorescent lights that must stay on at all hours. never lit by the moon.
the trees are clinging to their last few dried-looking white tea leaves. everything must go.

in the pond. by the edge. something's there.

it stands out like a bright green radio-active mistake of nature, bobbing there, magnetized with the rest of them to the bank, like some summer leaf that didn't get the memo.
it's a small bottle, a very small bottle, a definitely non-industrial sized bottle, a bottle about the size of a salad dressing. an empty bottle.

an empty bottle of miracle-gro.

floating there, comically dwarfed by the bigger miracle of death, fall and everything must go.