Palmer, A. y Brown, B. (2014) The art of asking [Versión para lector digital]. Grand Central Publishing
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Destacado: laughed thinking about the hundreds of hours I’d spent standing on a box, gazing silently and wistfully at passersby, handing them flowers in exchange for money. I laughed thinking about working in strip clubs during that same period, gyrating to Nick Cave and staring into the eyes of lonely, drunken strangers, challenging them to look into my soul instead of my crotch:
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Destacado: thirteen. As I related this story the next morning to a small theater filled with two hundred Women Of Microsoft, I added a confession. In all my rock-and-roll years of running around, supporting people, advocating for women, giving all these strangers and fans permission to “embrace their inner fucking artist,” to express themselves fully, to look at their work and lives as beautiful, unique creative acts, I’d somehow excluded my own mother. And maybe, by extension, a lot of other people.
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Destacado: the field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette. Which is to say: there are no rules. Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broke
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Destacado: The politician Tip O’Neill once said something along these lines: If you want to make someone your real friend, ask them for a favor.
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Destacado: , I want to stick around to see every baby get born and every wound heal and every heart evolve. But I don’t. I can’t. Every night, I drive away. You
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Destacado: defensive. Brené Brown, a social scientist and TED speaker who has researched shame, worthiness, courage, and vulnerability, recently published a book called Daring Greatly,
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Destacado: e had abandonment issues, and I had commitment issues. Go figure. Also, the sex, which had been fumbling and awkward at the beginning of our relationship, got really hot. We figured that was a promising sign of general relationship progress. Mostly
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Destacado: All artists connect the dots differently. We all start off with all these live, fresh ingredients that are recognizable from the reality of our experiences (a heartbreak, a finger, a parent, an eyeball, a glass of wine) and we throw them in the Art Blende
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Destacado: ; a stripper (about $50 per hour, but it really depended on the nig
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Destacado: official titles and responsibilities come even deeper, scarier layers of oh fuck they’re gonna find me out.
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Destacado: The Dresden Dolls, who are not only mediocre as a duo, but totally unoriginal as well. Amanda can’t get through a show without trying to shock people…and her piano playing is atrocious. It’s obvious that the real brains and the real musician in that band is Brian (stellar drummer by the way, too bad his playing is totally mocked by Miss Palmer).
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Destacado: There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are.
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Destacado: Managing the band meant making friends with other freaks in other cities, finding performers to share the stage with, lining up couches to crash on, chasing down a gallery where a friend was hanging paintings and was happy to have a band play at the opening. Slowly
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Destacado: It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.
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Destacado: . My PMS can be brutal: I transform from a pretty reasonable person into a black hole of doubt, despair, and existentially flailing Muppet arm
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Destacado: , But you know. You would say, “I’m an ARTIST…fuck you, Mom! What do you know?! You’re just a computer programmer.” I had to admit…I could totally imagine myself saying that as a teenager
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Destacado: recommend street performing over attending a conservatory to any musician, especially if they’re going into rock and roll: it wears your ego down to stubbly little nubs and gives you performance balls of steel.
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Destacado: Just as I was about to break character and wrestle myself free, someone from the crowd moved in and grabbed the guy, pulling him off me and dragging him a safe distance away. I didn’t break character. I watched the whole scene play out like a movie. The crowd applauded. I gave the Samaritan a flower, pressing my hands together, a gesture of heartfelt gratitude. Then I got back to wor
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Destacado: She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a mai tai was going to make her look like an asshole. What does it matter where you are or whether you’re drinking a coffee, a mai tai, or a bottle of water? I asked. Aren’t they paying for your songs so you can…live? Doesn’t living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a mai tai—not just sitting in a room and writing songs without ever leaving the house? I told
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Destacado: Occasionally one of the more broken-looking homeless people of Harvard Square would approach me, drop a dollar in,
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Destacado: The beautiful vision of strangers in their pajama
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Destacado: Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharin
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Destacado: vulnerable. You know, Amanda, it always bothered me. You can’t see my art, but…I’m one of the best artists I know. It’s just…nobody could ever see the beautiful things I made. Because you couldn’t hang them in a gallery. Then there was a pause. I took in a deep breath. God, Mom. Sorry. And she laughed and her voice turned cheerful again. Oh, don’t worry, sweetie. You were thirteen.
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Destacado: excited. Jacky’s mother took me aside and pressed a teeny little Bible, the size of a pack of cards, into my hand. Then she said, For you. Thank you, for stay here. Your music, helps Jacky. You make her so happy, you help her. Thank you, thank you. I felt my insides cringe. How is this fair? This is fair, I realized. This is fair. The music is the flower.
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Destacado: To tell my artist friends that it was okay to ask. It was okay to ask for money, and it was okay to ask for help
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Destacado: now. You said: “MOM, I’m a REAL ARTIST. You’re NOT.” Oh,
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Destacado: wedding before dinner. I brought three outfit possibilities in a bag, and let the kids pick. They chose the old Eight-Foot Bride dress. I
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Destacado: And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected. When
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Destacado: complaining to my broke-ass artist friends about how to adjust to dating a rich guy felt like it was in particularly poor taste.
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Destacado: tell them that in truth, many people enthusiastically loved helping artists. That this wasn’t a one-sided game. That working artists and their supportive audiences are two necessary parts in a complex ecosystem.
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Destacado: they saw their tips into the hat not as charity but as payment for a service. If asking is a collaboration, begging is a less-connected demand: Begging can’t provide value to the giver; by definition, it offers no exchange.
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Destacado: Edward and the collected company listened to my piano songs warbling through the speakers. Hearing my own singing voice paralyzed me, and another voice that I knew intimately rose up inside of me: I can’t write songs. I can’t sing. I have a fucking phony English accent and THESE PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY ENGLISH. How humiliating. And god, my lyrics are so pretentious and stupid and self-indulgent. Who the fuck do I think I am? I
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Destacado: since it seemed impolite to be extending Boston house-party invitations to our fans in St. Louis, we made one email list per city. I considered the email list our pride and joy—the
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Destacado: Or the longer, more complicated story about the friend who was supposed to be at the show, but had just committed suicid
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Destacado: We formed the band a week later and called ourselves The Dresden Dolls, in a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse-Five and the innocent, delicate porcelain figurines I always imagined strewn under the rubble of the decimated city. Dark, light, dark. That was us
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Destacado: In the band’s first three years, we played in friends’ illegal lofts, in makeshift art galleries, in crappy sports bars that were trying to lure in drink-buying customers with the promise of live music, in people’s living rooms, in used clothing stores, at benefits for feminist sex-toy shops. Whether we were being paid or not, if it was a gig, we took it.
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Destacado: I wanted to be loved for my songwriting, the musical dot-connection I’d been privately plugging away at for years, which showed me for what I actually was. Imperfect. And very, very loud.
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Destacado: That blog (which I titled “On Internet Hatred: Please Inquire Within”) still lives online
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Destacado: had a hard time keeping boyfriends. They usually lasted about a year, then things would start to get real—or appear to start going in a potentially real direction—and I would flee in terror. But I wasn’t very good at being independent either. I couldn’t stand to spend the night alone and was a serial drunk-dialer of ex
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Destacado: They all needed food. This kid wanted more than food. He also wanted lov
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Destacado: on their way to work who couldn’t afford to stop at that exact moment to appreciate art. Certain art hungers for context
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Destacado: Today isn’t “looking for patterns” day. This is not the time for that. This is the time to get back in line, to fill in your worksheet, to answer the correct questions. But your urge was to connect the dots and share, because that, not the worksheet, is what interested you.
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Destacado: Despite the fact that the majority of passersby ignored me (and occasionally sent me into spirals of existential despair), I had come to have a sort of faith in the street, and in the general public, because they would instinctively protect me. I was truly vulnerable up there, but I felt a benevolent force field of human energy around me.
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Destacado: : It isn’t what you say to people, it’s more important what you do with them. It’s less important what you do with them than the way you’re with them. You
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Destacado: banging their heads, throwing their fists in the air. But what about the people in the ninth, tenth, and twentieth rows? I couldn’t see them. I imagined them all standing there with their arms crossed, rolling their eyes at our gay mime antics, waiting to be sufficiently impressed. Signing fixed that, because we got to meet a pretty decent percentage of the audience every night. They weren’t judgmental hipsters. They were just sweet, human, smart, fumbling peopl
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Destacado: I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead. Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name)
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Destacado: Constantly and usually indirectly, often wordlessly, we ask each other—our bosses, our spouses, our friends, our employees—in order to build and maintain our relationships with one another. Will you help me? Can I trust you? Are
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Destacado: I never aimed to please everyone who walked by, or everyone listening to the radio. All I needed was…some people. Enough people. Enough to make it worth coming back the next day, enough to make rent and put food on the table. And enough so I could keep making ar
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Destacado: started to blend with each other, the only way we knew how. Using art. Collecting and connecting the dots of each other’s lives. All art, no matter what shape it is, has to come from somewhere. We can only connect the dots that we can collect.
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Destacado: Those who must beg demand our help; those who ask have faith in our capacity for love and in our desire to share with one another.
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Destacado: still. The first few moments up there were terrifying. I felt stupid, actually. Vulnerable. Silly.
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Destacado: The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous.
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Destacado: But honestly? I didn’t want to be a statue. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be vulnerable. Not as a character, but as myself. Facing the street as a statue had its challenges, but truthfully, it all felt like cheating, because I wasn’t actually showing myself. I was hiding behind a blank, white wall
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Destacado: Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct-support website through which her fans pay her monthly, at levels from $5 to $1,000.
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Destacado: two artists changed the energy of the room. It turned the random crowd into a real community
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Destacado: But I also wanted, very much, to see.
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Destacado: When I took the step from playing my few-and-far-between solo shows to playing in The Dresden Dolls with Brian, I felt a huge difference between asking people to listen to ME and MY songs and help ME ME ME, versus helping our BAND. It felt very
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Destacado: Our fanbase grew slowly but steadily. We’d go to a city—Philly, Portland, Northampton, DC—and play to fifty people, then a hundred and fifty, then three hundred. Word spread. The email list grew. We still had no manager, no agen
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Destacado: All performers—all humans—want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at.
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Destacado: , or on-again-off-again relationship with the latest drug-abusing (but really good-looking) boyfriend. I
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Destacado: removed the store name and address, and wrote a follow-up post, telling my fans that I’d been an idiot diva, that it was the insecure teenager talking. Then
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Destacado: There is a certain sense of indiscriminate gratitude that is essential to hone if you’re going to survive in the arts. You can’t really afford to be choosy about your audience, nor about how they wish to repay you for your art. In cash? In help? In kindnes
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Destacado: There’s a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen. When you are looked at, your eyes can stay blissfully closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open,
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Destacado: . The psychedelic mash of synthesizers, violins, and drum machines, plus the raw emotional honesty of the lyrics, stole me straight out of the clutches of the “standard” alternative music I’d been listening to (The Cure, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode, mostly).
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Destacado: When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn’t visible before. Have you ever noticed that this looks like this? And wit
Notas: Pienso mucho en las pijamadas. Y pienso mucho en Melina que cantó y bailó al mismo tiempo, y que eso conectó algo en mi cabeza.
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Destacado: . You can’t accept things halfway and walk through the door with your guard up. When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of you, they become your allies, your family. Sometimes people will prove themselves untrustworthy. When that happens, the correct response is not: Fuck! I knew I couldn’t trust anybody! The correct response is: Some people just suck. Moving right along. Shortly
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Destacado: People started writing to thank me for being brave enough to display the nastiness. But it didn’t feel brave; it felt like the only option, the only way I could deal with the pain. I still practice this same style of Internet jiujitsu to this day: I grab the hate and air it out, try to laugh at it, and share it back out into the world, so it doesn’t eat me alive
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Destacado: I’d apparently hit a nerve. But WHAT nerve, exactly?
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Destacado: …you had to be perfect. The way she said it hit a nerve. Perfect? What kind of perfect? Well, if a guy messed up a project, there was always another job waiting for him. But a woman? Forget it! You’d never get a job in that town again.
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Destacado: People got a kick out of dressing up for our shows, and we encouraged it. Top hats, zoot suits, body paint, feather boas, and wigs were de rigueur
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Destacado: how could I play music spontaneously in the street? I’m a pianist. I started playing the piano when I was three—because there it was, in the house—and since then I’ve been a generally monogamous instrumentalist. Occasional fantasies of learning how to play the cello, the guitar, and the acoustic bass have all been left unrealized
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Destacado: Sharing my life on the Internet has meant that everybody knows the immediate score of my existence. Fans in the signing line will ask, How’s Neil? Did he get to his plane on time? And, How’s your chest infection—have you finished that run of antibiotics?
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Destacado: I see it as a net. It has to start with the art. The songs had to touch people initially, and mean something, for anything to work at all. The art, not the artist, is what fundamentally draws the net into being
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Destacado: Yep. I’m the statue girl. Your burritos are free forever. What you do is incredible. You’re kidding. The free burritos saved me at least $40 a week in food cos
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Destacado: do. I notice a difference if I don’t sign after a show. It can feel deeply lonely. Not signing or hanging out after a show is like taking someone home for a one-night stand, having passionate sex with them, and then watching them, from the bed, as they get dressed
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Destacado: The truth just sounded too stupid. I wanted to be a Rock Star. Not a pop star. A ROCK STAR. An artistic one, a cool one. Like Prince. Like Janis Joplin. Like Patti Smith. Like the dudes in The Cure. The ones who looked like they Lived Their Art. I loved playing the piano, I loved writing songs, and I knew that if I had any choice in the matter, THAT’S the job I wanted. But
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Destacado: some of the most powerful, successful, admired people in the world seem, to me, to have something in common: they ask constantly, creatively, compassionately, and gracefully.
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Destacado: stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection.
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Destacado: I laughed thinking about every single artist I knew—every writer, every actor, every filmmaker, every crazed motherfucker who had decided to forgo a life of predictable income, upward mobility, and simple tax returns, and instead pursued a life in which they made their living trying to somehow turn their dot-connecting brains inside out and show the results to the wor
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Destacado: as I set off to tour the world with my band and put out my usual call to local volunteer musicians who might want to join us
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Destacado: This impulse to connect the dots—and to share what you’ve connected—is the urge that makes you an artis
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Destacado: Along with some thrown-together vintage costumes (to my delight, Brian loved to cross-dress) and our soon-to-be-signature white face paint (to my extreme delight, he loved wearing stage makeup), we had a magic chemistry that ambushed people with the sheer magnitude of our sincerity to emote.
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Destacado: Then there’s “Maximal DIY,” which is more about expansion and asking. The emphasis is on collectivism; you throw the problem out to your circles to see what solutions will aris
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Destacado: I have no interest in Doing It Myself. I’m much more interested in getting everybody to help me. I think a better definition might be UWYC: “Use What You Can.
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Destacado: their money felt symbolically valuable to me in a way that made me swell with pride—they approved of me, and their approval somehow meant more to me than anybody else’s.
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Destacado: The Legendary Pink Dots.
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Destacado: Honest communication engenders mutual respect, and that mutual respect makes askers out of beggars.
Notas: Wow esto me hace pensar muchísimo en mamá y en su begging for love or for attention, demandándolo en vez de confiar en el amor de la otra persona.
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Destacado: seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light. One is exhibitionism, the other is connection.
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Destacado: We share our art with one another. They help me run the business by feeding me constant information. I cop to my mistakes. They ask for explanations. We talk about how we feel. I twitter to say good night and good morning, the way I would with a lover. They bring me food and tea at shows when I’m sick. I visit them in hospitals and make videos for their friends’ funerals. We trus
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Destacado: People like Lee have a different relationship with the spotlight:
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Destacado: Lewis Hyde published a beautiful dot-connecting book in 1983 called The Gift,
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Destacado: think. I’m thirty-eight. I started my first band, The Dresden Dolls, when I was twenty-five, and didn’t put out my first major-label record until I was twenty-eight, which is, in the eyes of the traditional music industry, a geriatric age at which to debu
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Destacado: Dita Von Teese, a
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Destacado: there was no distinction between fans and friends.
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Destacado: Yeah. It’s a great video. So, Amanda. Here’s the thing. We think some of the shots of you aren’t that…flattering. He told me how they were concerned about my image and how they hoped I could edit out the shots that made me look fat. Now, my relationship with my body is pretty healthy.
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Destacado: Patreon.com, a new subscription service Sam was using, which allows fans to automatically deposit money into a musician’s account every time the musician releases a song, kind of like a book-of-the-month club for artists putting out content, so they can rely on a somewhat predictable income instead of praying that their Kickstarter will get funded every time they have something to release. (At
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Destacado: For most of human history, musicians and artists have been part of the village, accessing one another freely. They’ve been healers, listeners, mind-openers—in touch with the community, not untouchable stars on screens and behind barricades. I
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Destacado: because Neil had poured out so many details of his life the second time we met, he must be, like me, a chronic self-sharer. In
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Destacado: prefer playing a support role, they thrive doing it, taking pleasure in holding the light for others to run around in.
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Destacado: We wanted the people who came to the shows to feel like they were part of our weird little family, that they would never be turned away at the door for not being cool enough.
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Destacado: you going to screw me over? Are you suuuure I can trust you? And so often, underneath it all, these questions originate in our basic, human longing to know: Do you love me?
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Destacado: heads. We tried to set up an arm of The Brigade in every city; you just had to volunteer over email—to do basically anything—and I’d grant you a guest-list space. We paid with the usual currency we had on hand: T-shirts, CDs, backstage beer, shout-outs from stage, tickets, love.
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Destacado: world. I’m glad I started on the late side. It gave me time to have a real life, and a long span of years
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Destacado: It seemed simple enough to me: you work hard, you play for your crowd, you talk to, communicate with, hug, and connect with them in every possible way, and in turn, they support you and convert their friends into the fold. That’s when music works best, when people use it to commune and connect with one another. Simple
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Destacado: Minimal DIY doesn’t rely on trust; it relies on ingenuity. Maximal DIY relies on trust and ingenuity. You
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Destacado: has a story of a mentor, teacher, or unsung patron who loaned them money, space, or some kind of strange, ass-saving resource. Whatever
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Destacado: you need to GRAB her…this is a dance about trust, and control!! It’s a whole dance about the difficulty of love!…Good!…Yes!…She needs to feel you leading…and Amanda, Jesus, relax…let him lead…trust him…you keep trying to lead and you’re messing him up…STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THE DANCE!
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Destacado: The opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper”…that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation
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Destacado: researchers found that, as far as the brain is concerned, physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way…
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Destacado: In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple: The professionals know they’re winging it. The amateurs pretend they’re not. On
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Destacado: Fortunately, I decided against that and opted for a straightforward explanation of my experience as a street performer, my crowdfunding success and the ensuing backlash, and how I saw an undeniable connection between the two
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Destacado: Artists connect the dots—we don’t need to interpret the lines between them. We just draw them and then present our connections to the world as a gift, to be taken or left. This IS the artistic act, and it’s done every day by many people who don’t even think to call themselves artists.
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Destacado: What makes you think you deserve to earn money playing your little songs to people? What
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Destacado: I was obsessive about maintaining an email-based newsletter for the band and for the house parties. I could send out an email to fifty Boston friends, they would spread the word, and two weeks later, hundreds of people would show up at our house for a party. So the band’s email list began as the house-party inner circle, then grew every time
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Destacado: , if we didn’t have a place to crash, we’d just ask from the stage
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Destacado: Late that night, on the ancient upright piano, I played and sang four of my closeted songs to a small, drunk crowd of friends. Brian took me aside and declared: I am destined to be your drummer. I didn’t argue. I’d been trying to start a band and was heading towards my twenty-fifth birthday, the deadline I’d superstitiously given mys
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Destacado: I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (
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Destacado: People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy.
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Destacado: What do you do with news like that? You stop the signing line, you take that person in your arms, you hold them and let them cry for as long as necessary.
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Destacado: So I started a band. And we were loud. We had no guitars; it was just me on the piano and the microphone and Brian Viglione, who stumbled into my life like a long-lost musical soul-twi
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Destacado: Of all the insults hurled in my direction, GET A JOB hurt the most. It was an affront. I took it personally. I had a job. I was doing my job. I mean, sure. It was a weird job. And a job I’d created out of thin air with no permission from a higher authority. But I was working, and people were paying me. Didn’t that make it a job?
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Destacado: Art pries us open. A violent character in a film reflects us like a dark mirror; the shades of a painting cause us to look up into the sky, seeing new colors; we finally weep for a dead friend when we hear that long-lost song we both loved come unexpectedly over the radio wav
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Destacado: Kathleen Hanna. Singer of Bikini Kill, the seminal Riot Grrl band. She would know. She was a punk feminist icon who was used to being embroiled in controversy, cutting records, and touring; cult famous but never famous enough to fill a stadium. Like me, she’d spent years just working her ass off on her bands and projects, but had never been rich. Then she’d married Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, who had achieved stadium-sized succes
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Destacado: Asking is an act of intimacy and trust. Begging is a function of fear, desperation, or weakness.
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Destacado: Asking is, at its core, a collaboratio
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Destacado: The label and the band had different ideas about what “enough” meant. What
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Destacado: Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world. Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other. Sometimes
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Destacado: There’s really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And…it’s lonely.
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Destacado: The recaptured feeling of having a sleepover party.
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Destacado: she doesn’t mind charging her backers during what she calls her “staring-at-the-wall time,” which she thinks is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. Her fans don’t complain; they trust her proces
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Destacado: 3,000 bought you All The Things plus a show in your own home; I sold half a dozen of these, and had a blast delivering them throughout my next Australian tour.
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Destacado: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.
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Destacado: These were the people I was making the video for. In my opinion, they were the ones who were supposed to love it, and thereby feel encouraged to buy more music and drive the sales up. They were the target audience, as far as I was concerned, not some ephemeral, theoretical audience—dreamed up by the record label—who would rush to Walmart demanding my music upon seeing my svelte figure in a video
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Destacado: Everybody struggles with asking. From what I’ve seen, it isn’t so much the act of asking that paralyzes us—it’s what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one. It
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Destacado: My expenses included rent ($350 a month), food other than ice cream (I could survive on about $100 a month), and the extras: cigarettes, beer, records, bike repairs, and occasionally, clothes. I’d never had expensive taste and bought most of my wardrobe at the dollar-a-pound section of a used clothing store in Cambridge called The Garment District, which is where I found The Dress.
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Destacado: We have a fucked-up relationship with artists. While artists are, on one hand, applauded for their awe-inspiring, life-changing works of art, they’re simultaneously eyed with suspicion, disdain, and other sentiments of the GET A JOB variety.