The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  It’s like the storyboard for the song.

  Literally. When he first sent it to me it was a storyboard . . .

  It’s the first video to feel like a Lou Reed song. I mean, there was that robot-ripping-its-face-off video . . .

  “No Money Down.” Yeah. I thought that was really funny, that one. But yeah, as far as capturing what a song’s about, this is the first one. This one actually does get it.

  It adds something to the song.

  That’s what we thought. I mean the thing is that Matt understood it without me having to say anything, which was really great. Usually videos are pretty painful to do. But this one was actually fun. It was nice to see it realized.

  Also I didn’t really have to, like, really play Lou Reed in the video—and that gets pretty tedious.

  Fifteen minutes before I’m onstage, just so you know.

  Five minutes more, then?

  No, I mean, you can go for the whole fifteen if you want.

  Thanks. In the article on Václav Havel, you talk about the Lou Reed persona as something separate from you. Is that how you perceive it?

  Well, it’s something I use to keep a distance. Put it that way. But I would say it got out of control, and I’ve been deconstructing it. Which is really kinda funny, Neil, because I can go from this leather-jacketed street guy from New York, and then I show up and the next thing I hear is “What are you talking about? This guy looks like an English professor.” It’s actually hilarious.

  Do they want to see you still shooting up onstage? Or in makeup? Or in shades and leather?

  It depends what time they tagged into me. Some people are forever in the Velvet Underground thing, or the Transformer thing, or the Rock N Roll Animal thing—someplace around there. They’d like it to still be that. But I was only passing through.

  It’s “You’re still doing things I gave up years ago”?

  [Laughs.] That’s right. It is, isn’t it?

  Were you surprised by the commercial success of Magic and Loss?

  Astonished would cover it. It’s very strange. In a sense it’s my dream album, because everything finally came together to where the album is finally fully realized. I got it to do what I wanted it to do, but commercial thoughts never entered into it, so I’m just stunned.

  In the book, the notes at the end of the songs have a certain laconic teasing quality . . .

  If by “teasing” you mean I tell you a little bit and you would have liked to know a little bit more, then yeah. I thought it was just enough to let you know what was really happening and tie things together so you saw that there was a narrative. As though it was a novel except told in lyrics, and the little annotations were things that tied it together and gave you a little push onto the next one and also told you something that’d make you sit up for a minute. But I didn’t want to go on too long with that. That’d be another book.

  Are you ever going to write it?

  I’m interested in writing a book. But not about me.

  [Dings and twangs in background. People seem about ready to go onstage.]

  If there’s one difference between the early work and the current stuff, it’s in the persona of the singer. Previously Lou Reed was off on the sidelines: “I just don’t care at all,” “Makes no difference to me.” More recently there’s been a willingness to be involved and affected . . .

  Yeah. I took a stance about a couple of things.

  Why?

  I thought I’d earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people.

  In a lot of the stuff that I wrote about there’s no overt moral position, but what’s being described speaks for itself and I don’t think it needed me to say anything about it—I don’t take a superior view or any kind of elitist view toward any of these things: it’s life, and that’s what we’re talking about.

  But over the last couple of years there has been a change, in the sense that I think I am capable of taking positions that I’m not going to change my mind about.

  I think I can justify my opinions. They’re hard-won and heartfelt.

  You’re still in rock and roll after more than thirty years. Do you ever see yourself stopping?

  I just love doing it. This is like a new art form. You know, the CD, where you’ve got up to seventy-four minutes. It’s odd to me that the last three albums all timed out at fifty-eight, fifty-nine minutes, without aiming for it.

  To have, instead of fourteen or fifteen disparate songs, to have this something about one thing you can really sink your teeth into, is interesting: it might be interesting to do a two-CD set, the length of a Broadway play, I suppose.

  I think on Magic and Loss—eventually you have to take a swing at the major themes and certainly loss and death is one of them.

  They say that sex and death are all we’ve got to write about . . .

  Those are the basic themes. There’s a reason they’re there, but I think every generation has to have them reinterpreted for them.

  Also, while I don’t understand the process in great specifics, I do understand what talent is, and what a strange thing that is, and I’ve been trying really hard to set up situations in which it can flourish. And that’s the obligation I feel. To try to be true to the talent and make it possible for it to function.

  “In dreams begin responsibilities”?

  Oh sure. Absolutely. I have a dream too. And it turns out that a lot of the responsibilities involve not letting it become corrupted or compromised. Which all comes down to things you have to do in your personal life. That’s why I was fascinated by talking to President Havel . . . [Over the phone I can hear buzzers going off. It sounds like Lou ought to be onstage around now. Fifteen minutes are well up.]

  . . . I had to ask him, “Why didn’t you leave? You could have left. You could be teaching at Columbia—you’re a famous playwright.” He said, “I live here.”

  Did that reflect your attitude to New York?

  It’s exactly my attitude to New York. That’s why I was asking— I related to it in my own small way.

  You’re being buzzed, Lou.

  Yeah.

  [He seems perfectly happy to keep them waiting. “First thing you learn . . .”]

  The thing is, I have my dream too. I’m glad my wife was there when I met President Havel, because otherwise I’d just think I dreamed it.

  So where do you see the future going?

  I want to take the writing further. I think that an album every three years isn’t enough. I’m at the point now where I think I know what I’m doing.

  As a writer?

  Right. The Havel piece was hard.

  Good writing ought to be hard.

  You have to really want it. If you don’t, it’s sloppy. It’s actually offensive—you’d be better off driving a truck.

  I got to run . . .

  XII

  BETWEEN THOUGHT AND Expression isn’t a badly transcribed, pirated flimsy-covered book of the lyrics of Lou Reed. But what the hell. It’ll do until one turns up.

  * * *

  This was originally published in Time Out and reprinted in Reflex #26, July 28, 1992.

  * * *

  Afterword Afterword: Evelyn Evelyn

  The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist.

  There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

  AMANDA PALMER IS an outgoing, astonishingly funny, irreverent, sometimes loud, almost unembarrassable, beautiful, chatty singer who plays piano as a percussion instrument. Jason Webley is a foot-stomping, freewheeling, gentle, aggressive houseboat dweller, who plays the guitar and the accordion. He always wear
s a hat and mostly has a beard.

  Oddly enough, it was he who introduced me to Amanda Palmer, in e-mail, almost three years ago.

  I heard Evelyn Evelyn before I knew anything about them. The song “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?” was on my iPod, a strange ragtime encrustation, as was a song about an elephant, called “Elephant Elephant.” The songs had crept onto my “Stuff I Really Like That I Don’t Really Know What It Is” Playlist.

  I’d not been friends long with Amanda Palmer when I asked her about the Evelyn Evelyn songs.

  “They are conjoined twins,” she told me. “Jason and I met them through MySpace.”

  “I thought it was you and Jason,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Conjoined twins. They have had a hard life. But they make amazing music. They have a whole album coming out. Jason and I are producing it for them.”

  “Is that true?” I asked. “Only, on the songs on my iPod, it sounds like you and Jason singing together.”

  Amanda Palmer said, “Funny, that.”

  I HAVE BEEN backstage at an Evelyn Evelyn concert. It starts out with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, who are two very different people.

  Then they strip down. Jason shaves and puts on a bra. They make up. They put on black wigs and they clamber into a striped costume which has room for both of them. They pull it up. They put it on.

  Evelyn Evelyn whisper to each other. The left-hand Evelyn seems slightly more masculine than the right-hand Evelyn. They do not meet your eyes. They are a unit. You watch them as they move, like one person. They are reluctant to walk out onto the stage.

  They play two-handed piano. One of the Neville twins plays the right hand, the other plays the left hand. The same with accordion, ukulele, guitar. They play two kazoos, for they have two mouths. Only one twin needs play the snare drum and cymbals.

  They sing. They relate to each other in a way they do not relate to the audience.

  Amanda Palmer sings to, and talks to, and cares about, and interacts with, her audience. Jason Webley is famous for getting his audiences magically drunk without even using alcohol.

  The twins exist only for each other—they play to each other, disagree, make up, care for each other, and whisper, always whisper.

  They are aware of the audience. They respond to applause. But they are not on that stage for us.

  AND PEOPLE ASK, as I once asked, whether Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley are actually Evelyn Evelyn.

  And they are not. They are something other, Eva and Lynn Neville, something that exists in a make-believe space inhabited by puppets and dreams. They are no more Jason and Amanda than the Haitian Loa, Baron Samedi, Mistress Erzulie and the rest, are really the horses that they ride. No more than Father Christmas was only ever your dad.

  CYNTHIA VON BUHLER here illustrates the life of the twins.

  She brings delicacy and charm to a story that contains tragedy and darkness. Her illustrations have all the simplicity of great children’s illustrations, but tell a story that could only exist because adults are foolish and confused and sometimes evil. She lets the Neville sisters and their story move beyond Amanda and Jason and their music and out into the world.

  Their story is hard and strange, and they have had more than their share of bad luck and tragedy. But then, the same can be said of most of us. It is one of the secrets of being human. It’s not the pain that you suffer: it’s how you take the pain and move on. In the case of the Neville sisters, they make art. And so do Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, and so does Cynthia von Buhler.

  This is the secret of Evelyn Evelyn. You can be them too. Start reading, and you will see through their eyes, and learn to whisper secrets to yourself in the dark.

  * * *

  This was the afterword to Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes, written by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, illustrated by Cynthia von Buhler.

  * * *

  Who Killed Amanda Palmer

  Like you, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Amanda Palmer had been killed. I remember the way the sunlight glittered on the water, and I remember most of all that I simply did not believe it, for it seemed impossible that Amanda Palmer (so wise and mouthy and lovely, so filled with life that it had always seemed as if she had stolen the life that rightly belonged to a dozen other people) could ever have stopped moving, stopped singing, stopped breathing. That she would never laugh that laugh again, dirty and delighted and huge, was unimaginable.

  The days that followed were strange days. Rumors abounded. I met a Hells Angel in a bar in Encino who swore blind that he knew the dude who had done the job, a man who claimed to have crushed in Amanda’s skull with lead piping, on behalf of a crazed ex-boyfriend.

  It became a national obsession. Who Killed Amanda Palmer bubblegum cards were traded and traded again in schoolyards across America. I still own two of them: one shows Amanda’s bullet-riddled corpse dangling from a wall; the other shows her body washed up on the shore of an unidentified lake, her face blue and puffy from the water, the claws of some crustacean pushing out from between her purple lips.

  I remember the candlelight vigils, and the shrines, dozens of them, in cities all over the world, spontaneous expressions of love from people who no longer had Amanda Palmer. They lit candles and left behind telephones, scalpels, television remote controls, exotic items of underwear, plastic figurines, children’s picture books, antlers, love.

  “She went as she would have wanted to go,” that was what a white-faced ’Manda, one of the growing number of Amanda Palmer impersonators, told me. Much later that night, swaying and sweating, the ’Manda confided in me that he was certain that the real Amanda Palmer had been “abducted by beings from a higher vibrational plane,” and that the photographs of Amanda’s death were not fakes, pasted and airbrushed in some back-alley studios, but actual photographs of the deaths of her “sister-selves,” creatures grown from Amanda Palmer’s own protoplasm.

  Very young children made up songs about the different ways Amanda died, killing her happily at the end of every verse, too young to understand the horror. Maybe that was how she would have wanted to go.

  If you see Amanda Palmer on the street, kill her, said the graffiti under the bridge in Boston. And beneath that somebody else wrote, That way she’ll live forever.

  Neil Gaiman,

  Beat and Pop Magazine, June 1965

  * * *

  These are the liner notes for the album Who Killed Amanda Palmer by Amanda Palmer, 2008, written when we barely knew each other.

  * * *

  VIII

  ON STARDUST AND FAIRY TALES

  “Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth.”

  Once Upon a Time

  Once upon a time, back when animals spoke and rivers sang and every quest was worth going on, back when dragons still roared and maidens were beautiful and an honest young man with a good heart and a great deal of luck could always wind up with a princess and half the kingdom—back then, fairy tales were for adults.

  Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience, no more than they were the intended audience of Beowulf, or The Odyssey. J. R. R. Tolkien said, in a robust and fusty analogy, that fairy tales were like the furniture in the nursery—it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.

  Fairy tales became unfashionable for adults before children discovered them, though. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, to pick two writers who had a lot to do with the matter, did not set out to collect the stories that bear their name in order to entertain children. They were primarily collectors and philologists, who assembled their tales as part of a life’s work that included massive volumes such as German Legends, German Grammar and Ancient German Law. And they were surprised when the adults who bought their collections of fairy tales t
o read to their children began to complain about the adult nature of the content.

  The Grimms responded to market pressure and bowdlerized enthusiastically. Rapunzel no longer let it slip that she had been meeting the prince by asking the witch why her belly had swollen so badly that her clothes would not fit (a logical question, given that she would soon be giving birth to twins). By the third edition, Rapunzel tells the witch that she is lighter to pull up than the prince was, and the twins, when they turn up, turn up out of nowhere.

  The stories that people had told each other to pass the long nights had become children’s tales. And there, many people obviously thought, they needed to stay.

  But they don’t stay there. I think it’s because most fairy tales, honed over the years, work so very well. They feel right. Structurally, they can be simple, but the ornamentation, the act of retelling, is often where the magic occurs. Like any form of narrative that is primarily oral in transmission, it’s all in the way you tell ’em.

  It’s the joy of panto. Cinderella needs her ugly sisters and her transformation scene, but how we get to it changes from production to production. There are traditions of fairy tales. The Arabian Nights gives us one such; the elegant, courtly tales of Charles Perrault gives us a French version; the Grimm brothers a third. We encounter fairy tales as kids, in retellings or panto. We breathe them. We know how they go.

  This makes them easy to parody. Monty Python’s “Happy Valley,” in which princes fling themselves to their deaths for love of a princess with wooden teeth, is still my favorite send-up. The Shrek series parodies the Hollywood retellings of fairy tales to diminishing returns, soon making one wistful for the real thing.

  A few years ago, on Father’s Day, my daughters indulged me and let me show them Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. The girls were unimpressed. And then Belle’s father entered the Beast’s castle, and we watched special effects of people putting their hands through walls and film being played backwards, and I heard my daughters gasp at the magic on the screen. It was the thing itself, a story they knew well, retold with assurance and brilliance.