ART WE LIKE: Amanda Palmer

Red hair, occasional corpse paint, piano, Velvet Underground references, sexually ambiguous song lyrics, a flattened German city = Vince has a crush.

Ok, so I guess there's "Art we like" and then "Artists we like" and I guess they usually overlap, but it's important to point out that they don't have to. For instance: Lee Majors. Lee Majors was The Fall Guy, therefore Lee Majors is awesome. He does not, to my knowledge, have anything to do with Surrealism. Yet he remains awesome.

Amanda Palmer, on the other hand, seems to be building up some pretty impeccable Surrealist credentials. First, she's half of the punk-cabaret band The Dresden Dolls, where she plays piano and sings with a guy playing drums. Right, we know. Cabarets were real big until like 1930, and punk came along, say, around 1970, so there never was a punk cabaret, but now we know what one would've been like, had there been one, thanks to Ms. Palmer. If Kurt Weill and Johnny Rotten had had a band, this would've been it. I mean, it's not Morton Feldman, but it's pretty Surreal.

But this fall, Ms. Palmer put out her first solo record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer (no question mark), and to commemorate the release of it, she seems to be creating her own little world. In addition to the album, there are exhaustive online production notes, a series of videos that go with each song but somehow weave together into a coherent-ish narrative, and a forthcoming book by Neil Gaiman that, as I understand it, is back-dated to something like 1964. Why? Because it's friggin' Surreal. Come on.



And, on the album, she sampled this video (which, while we're at it, we'll give Surrealist props to James Bewley, too, who created this whole Strindberg and Helium thing):



I haven't even mentioned that she's friends with Jason Webley, who plays accordion and who we also like, and she seems, you know, fun. So, yes. I admit it. I have a little bit of a crush on Amanda Palmer. But she's also Surreal.

So it's ok.

Vince out.