The Universe in Verse returns – an evening of poems celebrating science, read by beloved artists, writers, and musicians, benefiting the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Artist David Mack’s gorgeous watercolor video for Jack and Amanda Palmer’s equally gorgeous cover of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” from their father-daughter record You Got Me Singing – an ode to the dignity of the downtrodden and the dispossessed.
Monday, April 24, in Brooklyn: The Universe in Verse – an evening of poems celebrating great scientists and scientific discoveries, read by beloved actors, writers, and musicians (including Rosanne Cash, Amanda Palmer, Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, Tavi Gevinson, Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, astrophysicist Janna Levin, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and more) – essentially an elaborate protest against the defunding of science and the arts: All proceeds from tickets are being donated to the Academy of American Poets and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
More information here.
Please help spread the word.
To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.
This is what we – as artists – have always done. We take our pain and we transform it into some kind of narrative, some show or story, something … else. We frame our trauma as best we can, and we offer it up. At best, it’s a gift; at worst, it’s a product. And the amount of enduring respect we bestow on our artists seems to be directly proportionate to how well, how authentically, how selflessly, they can take and deliver an emotional selfie like this.
[…]
Any pain of any size can be transmuted into a gift of art. We cannot “make sense” of anything, really, although we can plod forth with our stupid little notebooks and paints and guitars, with our pathetically small little mirror-shards of offered reflections to one another, showing the poetic debris we’ve managed to harvest from our suffering.
If you can get past the idea that love is this corny cliché – a Hallmark concept – and is instead the glue that bonds us together, and ultimately bigger than any pain and fear we are encountering, it can be very powerful. Especially when you do it in a room with people.
Amanda Palmer and her dad did a magnificent record of covers of Victorian nursery rhymes, 1960s protest songs, and other forgotten vintage gems. There are a million reasons to love it, and a million reasons it speaks to our time.
More on NPR’s All Songs Considered.
From the liner notes, which I wrote:
What emerges is a record of searing tenderness and sorrowful optimism, harmonizing heartbreak and hope — for this particular father and daughter, and for the world itself. This collection of songs is an elegy in the proper sense — a dialogue between loss and celebration, reminding us what we so easily forget: that every life carries weight; that even the downtrodden and the dispossessed are animated by tremendous dignity; that life is not something that happens to us, much less something that has already happened to us, but something we actively construct and calibrate each day.
Get this almost unbearably beautiful record here.
If you’re good at trusting strangers, and you put yourself in a general environment where the strangers are not assholes, you can do everything. But you have to go into it with the expectation that we actually are a global village and not buy into all the bullshit that we should be separated and afraid of each other.
Wonderful
Nylon interview with
Amanda Palmer about art, motherhood, and creative culture. Complement with
her conversation with Debbie Millman about art, love, loneliness, motherhood, trust, vulnerability, and our lifelong quest to feel real, then revisit her magnificent
BBC open letter on the choice to become a mother as a working artist.
We’ve constructed culture in a way that people are not feeling recognized, loved, accepted, happy with their place in society… What have we done to create such unhappiness?
Magnificent
Design Matters interview with
Amanda Palmer – an openhearted conversation about art, love, loneliness, motherhood, vulnerability, trust, and more.
This is the power of art: At the end of her Design Matters interview, Amanda Palmer plays “Bigger on the Inside” at the studio as host Debbie Millman cries.
To hear their terrific conversation when it’s released — perhaps the finest in 11 years of Design Matters — subscribe to the show here.
