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Hippies and Ukuleles For The Win: An Evening with Amanda Palmer in Portland | Vortex Music Magazine

Joined by Storm Large, Erika Moen and friends on her ‘The Art of Asking’ book tour, Palmer’s stop at the Wonder Ballroom featured heartfelt book readings, musical performances and humorous, insightful and delicious discussion. Photos by Chelsea Gaya

The wildly decorated people stood in the bleak cold, queued up in what could have been a fancy beggars breadline and looking as if the circus or the Comic Con had just let out for the night… but the show was just about to start.

The warm and eclectic crowd, smelling of musk, fur, incense and leather, pushed their way into the Wonder Ballroom on November 19—a gorgeous herd of afghan covered gypsies, finger-gloved and lip-pierced, wrapped in kimonos, wearing peacock feather fascinators. They were darkly clad, tribal-tattooed, bustiered, crow-black coiffed and mohawked. Some wore layers of tablecloth hiked up for skirts, some sported jackets fit for a white linen dinner. One girl, a bony bride in a skeleton sweatjacket, paraded past with a mass of cotton candy magenta-colored hair crowned by a headband of black flowers with a flowing, spidery veil. They came in pageboy and bowler hats armed with ukuleles. They were circus beauties and sideshow outcasts, a fanciful, freakish canvas of carnival color, and they were all here to see the woman who they were imitating in their costumed incarnations of her many looks. Miss Amanda Fucking Palmer.

READ the rest at the Source: Hippies and Ukuleles For The Win: An Evening with Amanda Palmer in Portland | Vortex Music Magazine

FEATURED, home, humor

Junk Drawer

The inventory here says, I hang pictures and fix broken glass. I solder and glue gun, wrap twine and staple. I illuminate things, measure them, give them power. I can calculate, paint, and highlight. Nothing can come loose or get away—I’ve got screws and nails and velcro for days. Oh, a Kazoo and emergency chocolate! I have change to spare, and yes, I will put down some glitter glue on shirt or a stocking. Maybe it’s just a poorly kept mad woman’s toolbox, but I think we should rename the junk drawer to something more amazing like “utility treasures” or “arsenal of the imagination,” for everything I’m able to do.